As Travelport prepares to launch its next generation
platform – which will do away with its trifurcated back-end cores of Worldspan,
Galileo and Apollo in favor of one system that provides multi-source content capabilities
– the company is unveiling a new visual identity that CEO Greg Webb says
reflects the transformation that has taken place at the company since he became
CEO in August 2019.
“We’ve had a monumental culture shift of the thinking and
the mentality of both our employees and the way that our partners and customers
think about us. We’ve gotten ridiculously laser-focused on the fact that we
know what we do well, which is when we provide a content aggregation source and
a retail marketplace in the travel and tourism space, and so we are focused on
being the best at that,” Webb says.
“We are acting differently, we are talking differently and internally
we are different than we were before, and so we need to look different.”
The rebrand – with a new logo, new colors and a tag line of “change
is for the brave” - comes ahead of the launch of the new platform, which some
Travelport clients currently are migrating to ahead of a broader rollout in the
coming weeks.
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“It’s not as if ... we flip a switch and there’s something
brand-new. It will be a value delivered over the next couple of years that
people will be able to tangibly see this works differently, this is better,”
Webb says.
Along with the new platform, Webb says the company is
focusing on staying “true to our core” to simplify processes and to help “suppliers
and sellers maximize value on every transaction.”
To that end, the company has streamlined
its activities, for example selling corporate booking platform Locomote back to
its founders last summer, settling
the sale of eNett and Optal to WEX in December and de-prioritizing work on
things such
as blockchain.
“There were tech things we were spending money on that,
while they might have had marginal benefit in the future, weren’t game-changers and they weren’t going to change the way the industry looked at us,”
he says.
“We need to stay true to our core. Unlike some of our competitors
and others we don’t spend our time on a bunch of airline products. I’m not
trying to sell revenue management to an airline somewhere. That’s not what we
do and we’re not going to do that.”
What is a priority, he says, is to make Travelport even
faster at creating solutions to help customers.
“Speed kills. If you are faster to yes, if you are faster to
market, if you are faster to find new innovative things that change the
marketplace, if you’re faster to finding innovative ways to deliver better
capabilities, you are going to win,” Webb says.
“So I think we have gotten significantly faster at Travelport
in the last two years ... but I’d like us to go faster.”
Webb reiterates
that he does not like the term “global distribution system,” saying it “refers
to a legacy environment that was created 20 years ago... [and] pigeonholes you
into thinking about the history of the industry as opposed to the future of the
industry.”
Instead Webb prefers the term “multi-source content aggregator,” acknowledging
that it also expands the definition of who Travelport is in competition with, beyond
GDSs such as Amadeus and Sabre to “anybody that is trying to step into the
multi-source content aggregation space.”
Following COVID-induced layoffs and a $500
million financing package announced in June, Webb says Travelport is
definitely going to get “bigger” in the future, possibly through merger and acquisition deals.
“I think we will certainly be accretively acquisitive if we
find opportunities that make us better as a company. We are not going to grab a
bunch of things that don’t fit our core mission,” he says.
“Our sponsors have been terribly supportive of the company
during this time period and certainly would be supportive of us as we look at
potential acquisitions.”