Brett
Burgess, ATPCO president and CEO talks:
- Prep
for his new role
- ATPCO's
Product Catalog
- AI
in modern airline retailing
Brett Burgess
is ATPCO's current president and CEO, having stepped into the role early this year. His background includes stints at
Sabre and Boeing, among other companies. He also comes into ATPCO at a time of
significant change in airline distribution. BTN senior editor Donna M. Airoldi
talked with Burgess at ATPCO's Elevate conference in April in Atlanta about
these changes and how they might affect the corporate segment. The following
has been edited for length and clarity.
BTN: How did your prior positions in the
industry prepare you to run ATPCO today?
Brett
Burgess: I got to know Sabre first as a consultant, then the CTO offered me
a role to lead technology strategy for [the company]. Sabre at the time hadn't
really adopted the cloud, so I worked together with the technology leadership
team and the rest of the company's organization to build not only a cloud
strategy, but a technology modernization strategy and plan. That required me to
learn in a really detailed way how distribution works from a technology point
of view and learn all the ins and outs of the differences between hosted
airlines in a [passenger service system] and airline distribution through a
[global distribution system].
It also exposed me to … their airline solutions beyond the
PSS, so operational software that help airlines operate. Then I made a lateral move into
the GDS, and the first product I took over was air shopping. At the time,
airlines were introducing brands into the market in the United States. That's
when I got exposed to fare basis codes and this entire thing that we do to
distribute offers. That's also when I got to know ATPCO.
I then learned about what Routehappy was doing and observed that the GDS
had a tenuous-at-best relationship with many airlines in the world, and I was
seeking ways to improve airline distribution. … We pioneered getting Routehappy
into GDS shopping responses. At first, it was just the attributes, then we were
trying to figure out how to get the visuals in. That's when I really got to
know ATPCO and the moves that it was making to modernize airline distribution.
Jeppeson Foreflight was a great opportunity for me to
learn the discipline of being a chief product officer. I joined Boeing at a
time where [it] was working through the Max crisis, and then COVID hit, so I
learned a lot about leadership through crisis and what it takes to keep your
team engaged when things aren't going great.
BTN: Some people have said that fare
filings are going away as we move to offers and orders. What do you say?
Burgess: ATPCO has the opportunity to
continue to lead in developing new ways to help those offers reach the market.
I think airlines see that as the panacea of how they reach travelers. At the
same time, they still have the same needs. In other words, generating an offer
is easy when you've got a traveler on your website. Generating that offer when
somebody is not on your website in a different channel and reaching that
traveler directly takes something different.
BTN: Our audience tends to focus on
indirect channels.
Burgess: That's an enduring need, and
it's not only a traveler's desire to comparison shop, but also the
corporation's duty to their travelers to make sure that they're getting to
where they need to go and in a timely manner, and you could track where they
are in the world. So there continues to be a need for having common frameworks,
for having a data foundation that is understood in the same way by everybody,
and there's a ton of efficiency in having one place to do that, and ATPCO as a
neutral company in that value chain can serve both sides in a trusted way. Even
with offer [and] order, I envision that that is an important role, and we've
talked about some of the technologies that we're building this week—Product Catalog
is an important aspect to that, especially when airlines need to interoperate.
[BTN: ATPCO
introduced Product Catalog at its 2024 Elevate conference.
It is an electronic record of airline products and services designed to
separate product definitions from pricing as the industry transitions to dynamic
offers.]
Burgess: Even if you assumed you could
reach every traveler in the world in every channel directly and bypass all of
the legacy distribution systems that are out there, you would still need the
ability to interoperate with your partners. If there's an interline between two
airlines, and you're creating an offer dynamically to a single traveler, the
product has to be understood to be the same. Otherwise, you're going to have
all kinds of confusion when the traveler shows up on the day of travel. Product
Catalog fits perfectly into that role. … We seek to provide endless flexibility
to what airlines can put into the market, and we also seek to help them do that
in a way that can be understood by all.
That also becomes foundational for what artificial
intelligence needs to do as travelers are shopping in that channel and
eventually as agentic AI enables booking in that channel. Product Catalog will
provide a common understanding of what products are on offer, and ATPCO [will]
help standardize the definition of those things. Then when offers are
constructed, whether that's through a traditional shopping experience or
whether that's through an agentic shop, the chances of miscommunication go way
down. It also enables innovation on top of that. Air shopping is ripe for
different models instead of doing fare-led or price-led searches. You can do it
based on attributes, … but only if the AI understands the value of the data or
the meaning of the data. … Once they understand the meaning, then you can
endlessly combine things, and that also frees up airlines to focus on the
strategic aspects of making relevant offers and pricing them in the right way
rather than having to worry about adapting to each new channel that rises up.
BTN: Is Product Catalog a bridge
between legacy and modern retailing systems?
Burgess: You could think of it as a
bridge or as an exchange. Where we're starting with Product Catalog is the team
has built [it] so that it can ingest today's fares and translate those fares
into products and product definitions that are human readable but also that
have standardized metadata that surrounds it. It's a fast way to get started if
you're building a dynamic offer engine. You can get started very quickly by
simply ingesting the fares and rules that you've already published through
ATPCO. It also provides a user interface so you can manually update and change
those things. We've also built APIs so that if an airline wants to do that
through their own product catalog solution that an offer engine provider
provides, or an order management system provider provides, then they can manage
it on their side and then transfer that data to ATPCO. And the value we provide
is we ensure that anybody who connects to that product catalog has a shared
understanding of what the product is and how you define it.
So downstream systems that want to consume that, whether
that's in the indirect channel or whether that's other airline partners, now
have a shared definition. That's the foundation of what we've built. It really
is an essential ingredient to dynamic offers.
BTN: How is ATPCO and Product Catalog
helping to bring about dynamic bundles?
Burgess: Airlines can do it today. They
can use the fare structure and update, not in real time, but in near-real-time
offers, especially to the corporate channel where you've probably got
pre-negotiated bundles. But coming back to the Product Catalog, that's the
essence of what it enables and actually most of the dynamic offers [are]
ancillary bundles. Because if it's just the seat, there's nothing to bundle
with that. So, most of the work of the Product Catalog is enabling dynamic
ancillary bundles.
I think what will especially accelerate adoption is when
corporate travel programs realize that they can save a ton of money, not just
on the seat, in the hotel and the car, but if you're traveling for work, at
least speaking personally, I can't remember the last [international] flight
where I didn't pay for Wi-Fi. And because I need to be working, I can't take 12
hours off while I fly across the ocean. If you can incorporate that into a
corporate bundle that receives a corporate discount, and that discount is there
if you pre-buy but not if you buy on the plane, I think you'll see really quick
adoption, because now interests are aligning not only on the bundle, but on the
pricing strategy.
BTN: Will AI be adopted first for
leisure then corporate?
Burgess: I've seen adoption on both
sides. If you listen to the Concur president talk, they're building that into
Concur now and they've already got customers using it in a beta format. I
believe that's what I understood him to say and so that may actually move
faster than agentic commerce and leisure simply because while there's a wide
variety of use cases, the use cases are probably narrower than [for the]
leisure traveler, where if you're a corporate traveler, you're not doing tours
as part of your corporate booking.
BTN: How might the industry changes
discussed at Elevate this week affect the corporate travel sphere?
Burgess: There's still a lot of friction
in the process today. Listening to corporate travel managers and their channel
partners particularly in NDC serviceability, I believe that AI has the
potential to help fix a lot of that. One, by just simply speeding up the
development process. As software engineers are adopting AI coding tools, it
significantly reduces their time to build and release. Also, the ability to
perhaps abstract away a little bit from the complex nature of implementing an
NDC API, both on the airline side and on the travel management company side. I
think AI will also simplify that process. The more you can simplify those
things, the more the airline will be able to get to the tougher things in NDC
distribution, which is on the serviceability side. So whether directly or
indirectly, AI really helps with that.
BTN: How do you
see this affecting the indirect channel for TMCs and corporate travel managers?
Burgess: ATPCO's role
remains steady in helping corporate travel managers and their systems have the
same access to the data that airlines file with us today. That's essential.
Some airlines will never adopt an offer-order system, or at least not in the
near future. They just either aren't big enough or don't have the capacity to
invest in that, or for the market they serve don't need it. So, we'll continue
to provide the same fare capabilities we do today, but I think as AI gets
adopted in the corporate channel, it really can simplify the workflow for a
traveler.
Imagine that your AI agent can understand your calendar
and suggest itineraries for you proactively. Instead of doing a search, you're
selecting from among a set of options that have been presented to you. And the
huge advantage there is AIs will be very good at understanding policy, and the
mechanisms by which you can fine-tune an AI today have gotten easier than ever,
so you can fine-tune the AI to each corporation's policy. That can be a game
changer in the corporate space. When that happens, now you've got an increase
in policy compliance and a decrease in the cost of your travel program, and
then there's going to be automation that also can happen in the background that
agents will help with.