What's the point(-to-point)? Man from the outside shares a view

Enhancements to KDS Neo announced earlier this week will play into the hands of its boss Dean Forbes.

Namely the addition of ground transportation because although the KDS chief executive has lived in Paris for two years, he admits to being unable to find his way round the metro.

He's also an Arsenal fan (but don't hold it against him) and was picked for the top KDS spot by founder Yves Weisselberger, who handed over the reins to Forbes in 2011, because he comes from outside the travel industry.

That's important because when people say "This is how it has always been done in travel," he can counter with experience earned at stints with companies including Oracle and Motorola.

Perhaps that's why KDS is one of a very few companies that is coming out with developments people are talking about, most notably Neo, which impressed judges (and left them speechless) at last year's PhoCusWright Travel Innovation Summit

In a (brief) face-to-face during the recent KDS Now event, Tnooz put a few questions to him:

What are this year's three biggest trends in business travel technology?

The consumerisation of business travel - applications are a long way behind the consumer world and that technology is migrating into the business travel world.

Mobile - I don't think mobile is a 'component' of how corporate travellers will manage themselves but the way corporate travellers will manage themselves so I get frustrated hearing we have an application or a mobile site, we have to be mobile.

Crowd sourcing approach - this feeds back into mobile. Things are becoming more and more social. If we have tens of thousnds of travellers in Paris, KDS will know it as well as how long they are going to be there.

There could be an opportunities for us to use that data to power crowd sourcing. What if you went to a restaurant and said we have all these travellers here...?

It's great for the corporate and great for the travellers and mobile enables that and it's only a matter of time before someone starts looking at this. It's more powerful from the user point of view.

We have not yet thought how we might implement this but I know what restaurant I like when I'm here. It is location-based in a sense but you are here now so we can be a step before that, it's much more contextual. We don't want to spam them but could do it if the traveller decides he wants that.

This idea of the 'Perfect Trip' being expounded by a number of companies, notably Concur and CWT, are we getting closer?

If you look at the Concur view, it is now even further away when you think about it in the context of open booking because that's about finding all the components and doing all the work yourself.

I think Neo is getting as close as we're going to get in terms of balancing corporate needs and individual preferences.

What elements of the perfect/end-to-end trip are still elusive?

Disruption, because today it is at its most powerful when nothing bad happens but, we rely on a TMC who still adds value when something goes wrong. Neo is not going to replace that but it should be more helpful when there are changes and disruptions.

I think it will just get richer from a content perspective. There are other types of content that would be interesting to integrate.

What are the challenges/barriers to getting there, for example, legacy technology, lack of industry collaboration?

We're not as subjected to them as others. Some other vendors have affiliation to a GDS which can limit them. Others have strong affiliation to TMCs. We don't really have that, we're like Switzerland.

What keeps you awake at night in terms of KDS, your role and business travel?

Our role is to make sense of a tremendous amount of noise - suppliers, payment verticals, travellers, customers.

It's a constant balancing act trying to deliver great service, great product and when any one of those shifts violently without warning it has a huge knock-on which customers are completely unsympathetic to - eg., an airline displaying fares in a different way becomes our problem pretty quickly. I have not found a way to solve that quickly and I would sleep a lot better if I could.

KDS is investing a lot in technology, are corporates willing to pay for it?

Corporates are willing to pay for it. It's becoming more difficult for them to control things with Gen Y and consumerisation so when we show them that Neo does a good job of engaging the travellers they will invest a premium to regain that level of control.

For example, travellers have to remove a hotel (in the system) and if they do that we tell management. Hotel attach rates have gone from 25% to 80% in some cases and the programme becomes more impactful over night.

We see you''re working with Siri developer Nuance for your voice recognition service on mobile. Is it a strategy to work with the best in breed players?

No, it really depends on the technology. Sometimes we choose companies like us, small crazy guys with great ideas. If it's core technology we will go for an established player, if it's on the periphery we choose an up and coming partner.

What have been the surprises, the unexpected since the launch of Neo last year?

We started out saying that the most important thing was the policy and as long as we get them to the meeting in policy why wouldn't you book it. Users did not like that and customers did not like it so we pivoted and integrated more choice.

The other thing is the complexity of the algorithm which also surprised us. People don't realise what it is considering, all the sources of information it covers.

Neo was hailed as a game changer, a killer-application, have the learnings so far been as expected?

It is pretty much as predicted, it comes back to the four (core) results (quick, cheap, recommended and green). About 82% make a 'one click adjustment'. Recommended and quick are the two most popular.

We'll finish with a word association game, we give you the word, you say what comes to mind: