The thoughts of a CTO, managing customer centric solutions for travel and e-commerce.
When a new member starts, I find it good to provide some 3rd party training material so we can ensure we’re all at the same level. Udemy provides a great cost effective source for video led materials.I use this in addition to our own LMS materials (confidential!) to ensure there’ s a common business understanding.
Here’s a link to some of the videos I use;
Continue reading “Onboarding materials”I’ve been working on a project with Pat.ai/EC.ai for several months, and what those guys can do with linguistic understanding (and context) is pretty amazing.
Looking at a traditional customer experience in travel.
A traditional UI for example google’s multi-itinerary flight search form, has prescribed inputs
The customer enters data, select dates, and builds their itinerary. – comparing this to a dialogue with a travel agent the questions would be mostly the same. (“I’m interested in going to Singapore, I need to go via doha to attend a meeting but just for a day. Here’s my dates”)
Continue reading “Conversational vs traditional customer experiences.”Traditional applications can be monolithic beasts with APIs as the final layer These services present a prescribed flow are often inflexible and were built to do a specific purpose.
Traditional applications are usually object oriented with a series of services being called internally, and eventually rendered as a soap/rest API. Quite often with all functions being within a single code repo.
Continue reading “Deliver innovation via micro services orchestration.”During COVID-19, I received a few linked-in requests for interviews about the day to day challenges of a CTO. I have to admit, I didn’t participate but it did trigger me to write this post.
As a Chief Technology Officer (CTO) I am responsible for the operation of technology and its associated systems. So I am responsible for technical infrastructure, monitoring, deployment, development and all 3rd party systems and integrations. The CTO also delivers against a strategy drafted from a joint vision of the business vision shared by the board.
Continue reading “A day in the life”When I heard that Jeremy Keith was creating a conference about patterns I jumped at the chance to understand how companies were managing their libraries.
In today’s OTA’s, flights are standardised. But airline’s aren’t equal, so why are airlines presented in the same way when booking flights indirectly?
Continue reading “Airlines are not equal so why do OTAs present them in the same way?”
Transactional emails are a common term used for important emails that relate to a purchase or booking event. Examples are; “Your package has shipped”, “Important information about your booking” or “Your flight has changed”.
Today when we access data online, web sites capture “big data”, often supplemented by 3rd party profiling data.
In this post I’m looking at how our data is shared, with whom and the accuracy of the data. With the upcoming EU General Data Protection Regulation this is an interesting subject. Continue reading “In the future, who will own my personal data?”
When comparing OTA and Airlines, they sell a similar product. Both sell flights, both sell packages (in most cases). So why is it that OTA dominate in online search?
Continue reading “Digital Maturity is the main gap between OTA and Airlines today.”
In the travel marketplace there have been a number of start-ups disrupting the norm. AirBnB came from nowhere. There had been peer to peer accommodation services for many years, but AirBNB came and made renting a room easy for a global audience and within a few years has become one of the market leaders.
Uber have done the same, challenging the norm for taxi services. Recently, talking to an uber driver, he expected his local taxi firm to close, and for their to only be the likes of Uber and Lyft in the near future.
These companies have formed as a startup and disrupted the norm, so whats to stop the next startup from doing the same in the airline industry?