With a topic of how tech will shape the future of travel, the crowd of a few hundred at Hotelbeds’ MarketHub Americas conference settled in to be entertained with stories about the wonders of artificial intelligence and ChatGPT.
Paula Felstead had bigger things in mind.
Like icebergs.
To Felstead, the chief technology and operating officer at Hotelbeds, technology is like an iceberg. “Everybody focuses on the top, white, shiny stuff — of which chat is probably the peak,” she said during a keynote address preceding a panel discussion on the topic on the closing day of last week’s conference.
“Everybody tries to forget that two-thirds of the iceberg is sitting invisibly underneath,” said Felstead, who’s been at Hotelbeds for nearly two years after previously working for companies that include Visa Europe and Barclays Bank. “It’s that two-thirds of the iceberg that will actually slow down your business or be barriers to moving quickly.”
While the public and, let’s face it, many CEOs and company boards of directors, are beguiled by flashy websites and the latest tech wizardry, the platforms and software carrying out the business — and too often the security shielding all of it — grow outdated, in some cases not just by months or years but decades.
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The worst of it, the densest part of the iceberg, if you will, is technical debt: outdated iterations of new technology that IT departments code around and keep upgrading rather than replacing with technology that could do the job faster, more accurately and more securely.
“Any company that’s had software for the last twenty years — every company — has technical debt,” said Luis Dinis, director of product management at Omnibees and one of the speakers during the panel discussion. “Technical debt is not sexy. It costs a lot of money to solve, a lot of resources. It’s not visible from the outside. … No one likes it, but everyone has it.”
As dull as technical debt may seem, managing it is essential, Felstead said.
“This is one of the things I wanted to make sure anybody sitting there thinking, ‘Oh, my god, I’ve got technical debt.’ You need to face it. You need to address it,” she said. “That’s why I’m so passionate about making sure that you actually invest for the whole of the iceberg rather than just the top.”
Her passion is not an abstract thing. Over the past 10 months, she led an overhaul of Hotelbeds’ entire platform “so that we are able to scale a 2022 platform instead of trying to scale a 1980s platform,” she said.
The company gave its clients, partners and suppliers a year’s notice of the change, hoping they would update their systems as well – and 80% of them did. It was a big ask, knowing Hotelbeds would lose some business, yet Felstead feels vindicated by the data demonstrating performance improvements of a system that’s 30% faster and 50% more accurate and can be scaled up immediately.
“The benefits far outweighed the downsides,” she said in an interview following the presentation.
During the formal presentation, she spoke of her efforts to understand what she called travel’s “love-hate relationship” with tech.
“Many of our leading brands in travel are using antiquated systems. I was shocked to my core when I turned off the last ever fax confirmation at Hotelbeds six months ago,” she said. “I was so fascinated by the fact that we were still being asked to send a fax confirmation. I actually went down the list of the hotels. My expectation was they would be in outer Mongolia, where the internet might be a bit quirky. No, these guys themselves were offering free Wi-Fi. And they still wanted a confirmation by fax? Really? Where are we?”
ChatGPT, AI and cybersecurity concerns
While the bottom of the iceberg got more attention than it usually does at such events, the panelists also devoted their attention to the new technologies sweeping the industry.
“AI is a great equalizer all of a sudden,” said Joel Spiro, head of product at Rappi. “There are people in Bangladesh, sitting there where a kid on his little computer can run a model that can do exactly what GPT and OpenAI are doing. Maybe it’s not refined. But it’s there, and it works, and every minute it’s getting more and more efficient. You’re going to be able to do things that maybe you had to go and work at Google to do.”
As travel rebounds, so do the cyber-criminals. That is an absolute fact of life. When we build new services and new products, we need to put security right at the heart of everything we do.
Paula Felstead - Hotelbeds
Dinis agreed. “Everyone sooner or later is going to use it,” he said. “The challenge here is how the companies use their own APIs [application programming interfaces] to integrate with ChatGPT.”
While Felstead shared her peers’ enthusiasm – she spoke of Hotelbeds’ commitment to continue investing in AI — she also offered a note of caution.
“My No. 1 rule in technology is always avoid the hype cycle,” she said. “Now I have to say that large language models and chat are truly amazing. As a technologist, I love them to bits.”
But she recalled a quote she’d heard from an AI professor that summed up the technology for her: ChatGPT is amazingly intelligent — but incredibly stupid. “Because it has no common sense,” she explained. “It does not have boundaries. And one last point on chat is please remember its source of data is the internet from 2021. Anybody remember ‘fake news’?”
While the line drew laughs, it’s the real news that weighs on Felstead and others responsible for their companies’ online security. During her keynote presentation, she spoke of the importance of being extra vigilant now.
“As travel rebounds, so do the cyber-criminals,” she said. “That is an absolute fact of life. When we build new services and new products, we need to put security right at the heart of everything we do.”
When Felstead worked in payments, she said companies shared the threats or attacks they’d seen so that they could work collectively to combat the mutual threat.
“I’ve not seen or heard of any such exchange of information to ensure that if one of us [in travel] gets attacked or one of us foils a cyberattack, that information could be shared,” she said. “This is one of the things I would like you take away and think about in terms of can we as an industry come together and put up a much more robust defense against a very real threat?”
The desire for cybersecurity cooperation in the travel sector mirrored her call for a more united front on retiring technical debt. Let companies compete on the more visible parts of the technology iceberg; if they work more in concert on the parts that nobody sees anyway, the improved connectivity will make the entire sector capable of greater things.
“We need to do some consistent investment, individually but also collectively if we want to achieve that frictionless travel, that personalization, that connected trip,” she said. “It requires all of us to be connected. It requires all of us to invest and for all of us to be secure.”
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