Designing, Marketing and Delivering a Connected, Seamless Travel Experience

With this latest book, Nawal K. Taneja shows how there is now an opportunity to offer airline passengers a new product, a connected seamless travel experience, that would reinvent travel, benefiting both customers and providers of a spectrum of travel services including airlines, hotels, car rentals, trains, buses, and sports events.

With this latest book, Nawal K. Taneja shows how there is now an opportunity to offer airline passengers a new product, a connected seamless travel experience, that would reinvent travel, benefiting both customers and providers of a broad spectrum of travel services: airlines, hotels, car rentals, trains, buses, ferries, theaters, sports events, and restaurants. The book conveys how, for an airline, such a product can be designed and delivered to meet emerging needs of customers and for the airline to a) enable it to differentiate itself by offering a much more integrated product and experience, b) generate new streams of data for planning and delivering the product, and c) generate new revenue through the sale of different types of ancillary products and services offered by airlines and their partners. The book explains how the development and delivery of such an innovative product requires a new approach to make each component of travel, from booking to delivery, fully integrated creatively within a framework of five strategic layers: having a common interpretation of the concept itself, overcoming major challenges to seize opportunities, building new end-to-end retailing capabilities, capturing the momentum of new technologies, and making end-to-end travel a C-Suite priority. There will be major challenges, such as liability, complexity, and scale, but Taneja illustrates how these can be managed based on the experience of other businesses. In addition to insights from best business practices, Taneja explains how emerging technologies (such as AI, analytics, and all-inclusive data) can help airlines and partners in the value chain to go beyond the sale of their core products to fulfill traveler needs for connected seamless travel and diversify their sources of revenue by monetizing non-core assets. As with Taneja’s other publications, this book provides a number of forewords and thought-leadership pieces, contributed by practitioners, to elaborate on topics discussed in the book. It is written primarily for executives and senior managers within airlines, airports, and air transport supporting industries, but will also add value for graduate students and university faculty researching the development of new travel products.