In the green room at Phocuswright with... Bryan Dove

What travel industry development or brand do you wish you'd thought of first?

Airbnb. However, not for what you would expect on home-sharing innovation. I’ve been impressed at how they have demonstrated that there is more than one way to grow a travel brand in this decade.

They forged a path that doesn’t primarily depend on digital performance advertising. I think we’ll see more companies like this emerge in the future.

Do you agree with the often-used phrase, "travel planning is broken”?

100%. The world has moved to mobile across almost all sectors yet travel planning and purchasing lags in mobile adoption rates.

There is still so much friction, confusing information and a lack of customer confidence in the travel planning process today. As an industry, we need to catch up and meet our collective customer expectations.

What’s the most interesting thing about you that we wouldn’t learn from your resume alone?

My passion for travel stems from a belief that spending time in other locations, with people from other cultures, increases your personal level of compassion, empathy and understanding.

The world can always use more of that! I learned this first-hand early in my career. I chose to live and work halfway around the world in India and haven’t stopped exploring the world since. It’s been quite a contrast from not even having a passport until I had to make my first international work trip.

As I’ve gotten older, I can see what a profound impact my early career and cultural immersion has had on me as a person. The opportunity to work in travel feels as much a vocation as it does a job.

What element in the industry do you consider is still the most difficult to measure?

I think brand awareness and sentiment are classic ones. Measurement tools are getting better all the time, but it is still approximating how millions of people feel about your company’s products and services and what they’ll do the next time they shop. There will always be some ambiguity in those areas.

Does the industry or do travelers drive change?

Both. We really try to understand and anticipate traveler needs from our product and sustainability is a good example of this. We know responsible travel is important to our travelers so we started highlighting greener flight options in our product and the traveler feedback was very positive.

In addition, we know that we need industry change to meet evolving consumer demands. One of the reasons we helped to form Travalyst is to help drive industry sustainability change at a systematic level.

When was the last time you spoke to one of your customers, and why?

All the time. Whether that be internally from my teams, friends and family or fellow travelers that I’ll meet along the way. I’m always fascinated to hear how people think about travel, the challenges they’re having and ideas to help solve them.

It’s amazing what you can learn by asking questions and listening. We try to encourage this across our organization as there’s very little substitute for hearing directly from a customer and listening to their feedback.

What one mistake do you witness others making more than anything else?

I think it is quite common in a competitive industry to focus on the short term. However, we talk about the need to innovate and change the industry in a more significant way and innovation takes time.

It is common to see startups that appear to have “come out of nowhere” and then the founders tell you “nowhere” was nine years in the making!

Doing something substantial and innovative takes time: for the creative process to unfold, for mistakes to be made and for results to materialize. As leaders, our jobs are to create the time and space for innovation to happen and recognize failure as part of the learning process.

Innovation and 100% success rate are incompatible goals.

What assumption about travelers have you found not to be true?

When I speak to people in the industry about why mobile travel planning is not the dominant model yet, I almost always get two answers: 1) the price point is too high, and 2) people prefer to complete their travel planning on a computer.

Based on the conversations I’ve had with many customers from around the world, I don’t believe these are true.

I’ve yet to meet someone who wanted to shop for groceries on their phone, but then wait until they were back at a computer to place their order.

I believe the price point argument is a fallacy as well. Grocery shopping is typically a bigger family budget item than travel. And yet, you’re seeing an explosion in mobile grocery shopping.

Consumers are increasingly comfortable with making larger and larger purchases on their phones. The question for us as an industry is, are we meeting their needs yet?

Think back to five years ago. Did you envision this is where you would be?

Not a chance. About five years ago, I made a choice to move from the pure technology areas of Microsoft and Amazon and spend some time in travel. It’s such an area of passion for me that the decision was easy.

However, to have joined a company like Skyscanner, which is aligned to my personal purpose and have the opportunity to be part of an incredible growth story to date - and the one yet to come- is a privilege.