Richard: Here we are to talk a little bit with Brett, who’s 90 days just about into the job.

Brett: Close.

Richard: Close to 90 days, and you worked in Ops, you've worked on the commercial side, distribution, and technology... And so your first 90 days, normally we say the first 100 days, but let's go 90.

Brett: Yeah.

Richard: So tell us about your first 90 days.

Brett: Yeah, sure. It's probably closer to 75.

Richard: Says 90 here.

Brett: But the question says 90. So you know the first 90 days. First of all, it feels like the industry has been incredibly welcoming to me and I think it's a strong reflection on ATPCO and what we do. I came in, obviously I've been in the industry for a little bit and so I came in with a point of view on where the industry is and where I think it needs to head. And I think my impressions, some of them have been confirmed. Some of them, I've been surprised by a few things, but overall just a tremendous amount of energy and reinforces what I believe ATPCO's role is, which is helping airlines connect their offer offers with travelers and doing that in every channel where we can find a traveler.

Richard: I was going to ask you what's the thing that you were way wrong on? But I could ask you in a different way. I could say, what's the thing that surprised you the most?

Brett: Yeah. So one of my points of view was fare filing must be going away, right? With all of the talk and adoption of modern airline retailing, fares, there must be something replacing fares. And while we see progress in that direction, certainly what I have also been surprised by is actually the opposite, right? Tremendous growth in the use of fares to reach travelers with relevant offers and increasing sophistication in what those offers contain. Ancillary bundles, brands have been well adopted. I think consumers have been better educated on what those brands are and are more accepted in the market than when I left the distribution side of the industry about six years ago. So I think that's been the thing that surprised me the most, and I think there's a good reason for that, right? Fares...we heard that earlier on stage fares are very effective at conveying not only what you get when you buy it, but also the terms and conditions that come with it, refundability, exchangeability and so on. And ATPCO has done, I think, a tremendous job at making that more and more seamless and also easier to work with. So we still have work to do. We still have a long ways to go on taking some of the effort out of that. But I think that's what surprised me the most.

Richard: Everybody knows that I'm biased towards industry utilities because I see an issue on the commercial side and on the contracting side. To have a stack of services from a single vendor that can be great, but that can also be complicated and much harder for innovation to happen. And, and that's one of my biggest concerns is that the contracts prevent the innovation when the technical opportunity exists. And ATPCO is one of the most unthreatening organizations in the sense that if you work with ATPCO, you're working with everybody in the industry. They have no interest one way or another. They're trying to treat everybody equally. And I think that's a very difficult job to do, to navigate between the different airlines. But the ambition is dynamic pricing or continuous pricing, if you want to get that. I get pulled up by some of our internal people, going, "It's continuous pricing, not dynamic pricing." So we have an ambition. We think we know where we want to go, but how far is that gap, and how big is that gap between where we are now and where we need to be?

Brett: Oh, good question. First of all, thank you for the kind words on ATPCO. I think it's a real testament to our team and our people and what brings us to work every day. And that is to make things work and to make things happen. And that's really the type of person that's attracted to work at ATPCO. And so we will always be welcoming and seek to help airlines and channel partners in every way that we can to help facilitate that. I think between ambition and execution, there's still gaps. I think the ambition is pretty clear to me. I think it's been really consistent. Airlines desire to be able to offer, whether it's continuous pricing or dynamic bundles, or just reaching travelers with the offers they have now. They desire to see that become easier, and in particular to recapture the direct connection with the traveler with an offer that is relevant. And I think that really is the essence when we talk about airline retailing. That's what they're trying to achieve. And I think there's still a lot of work to go on, especially on the system side, on the on the IT vendor side, just trying to figure out how it should all work together.

Richard: So if you can provide a stock keeper, but by the way, for those of you that issue RFPs, you need to send ATPCO your stock keeper RFPs. So just so I can get that out there.

Brett: Thank you.

Richard: My pleasure. This isn't on the list here, but is ATPCO thinking about things like stock keeper? Are you thinking about getting deeper into the offer management space, or is that a bit risky given regulatory issues? Are you sure you can keep yourselves clean and tidy and well delineated so we don't get into any of the potential issues that we saw with some airlines and some vendors recently being asked to explain themselves to Congress?

Brett: Yeah. Well, we certainly want to stay out of that seat. And there's a lot of misunderstanding too, about this new technology, and it offers new capabilities. And in some cases, you know, it's easy to misunderstand what airlines are attempting to do. I think we, I think ATPCO can absolutely stay clean of that. And the way that we do is a lot of the things that we've heard about today, even in a future world where, if we believed, for example, that fares would eventually be replaced 100% by dynamic offers, there is still a role to play in ensuring interoperability across the industry between airlines and with partners. That's something that the frameworks that ATPCO provides enables today and can enable in the future. While we may not be able to provide pricing recommendations, we can certainly help provide the inputs that an airline needs to enable dynamic retailing, and that's what we're doing with 3Victors.

Richard: So, shouldn't you be saying we will never be providing pricing recommendations?

Brett: We can never provide pricing recommendations.

Richard: That's right. So, practically, I joined one of the sessions yesterday, the vendor ecosystem. Brilliant idea. I know you've been doing something similar for a while, but this was a really good way to give smaller vendors the opportunity to have the data to be able to consume it, to send it back to you. What other ways are you helping practically get this moving in the right direction? Given there's a lot of resistance because of the existing infrastructure, the existing contracts. I believe the contract is everything, by the way, technically, we can do whatever we want, but the contract is what will decide what you can do. But how are you helping in a practical way? Give us, just give us a couple of concrete examples as to how you see what you're doing as little baby steps on the way to the final ambition.

Brett: Yeah, well, I was mentioning 3Victors. There's some enduring needs when an airline needs to generate offers, whether static or dynamic, you need market intelligence to understand even what offers you should make available, much less how to price them. But the more you know about the demand signals of what travelers are looking for. I thought yesterday Chris Phillips showed some really intriguing charts, examples of the World Cup, right? And how demand can change what customers are looking for in the moment, right. And the more you have really specific knowledge at a market level of that demand, the better you can respond with relevant offers. And so that kind of intelligence is key. I think also separating product from price, that's what Product Catalog is trying to do. So it's that is paving the way to an offer engine being able to make a dynamic offer. And, we shouldn't forget about Routehappy. Merchandising is still important. And travelers still, especially today, maybe more than ever today, want to see what they're about to experience. You know, that's what they experience in the social media channels. Influencers are showing them the experience. Travelers want that, and so Routehappy really helps airlines reach that audience.

Richard: So I mean Routehappy grew 150% last year? Is that right?

Brett: That's right.

Richard: So why isn't it 100? Why haven't we got 100% penetration? What would be the reason for that? And this is definitely not on this cards here. So yeah, why can't we get to an industry utility with everybody using it, using it all in the same way? That's the maximum efficiency for everybody, that's the lowest possible operating cost. What's the deal?

Brett: I don't think it's anything nefarious, or any airlines are refusing to use it. We cover 90% of all available seat kilometers globally today.

Brett: So that's really good coverage.

Richard: So it's the long tail that's missing.

Brett: I think it's the long tail. Every airline is on a different journey, and it takes a lot of work to curate visuals and curate detailed attributes, and so just some airlines aren't there yet.

Richard: OK. And what about the OTAs on the other side of the equation? What about the agents? I mean Judy seemed to be a fan and people using that. How do we make sure that... Because if everybody uses the same stuff and the same language, then there's a better chance of everybody understanding the same thing, right?

Brett: That's right.

Richard: So how are you managing, how are you pushing forward into the marketplace to try and get the OTAs, the rest of the OTAs working with Routehappy?

Brett: Well, we have great adoption today. In fact, the indirect channel OTAs and so on have been the early adopters actually of Routehappy. And what we're really focusing on now is adding additional, obviously additional OTA partners, but also helping airlines adopted in their own channel. And in particular, there's some really interesting work going on helping airlines better convey where there's interlining, not only the product that you know in your hub airport, but also the flight that you're going to get on. And so I think that's another tremendous opportunity for the industry again to communicate to the traveler what they're going to get.

Richard: Good. So that kind of leads to the next question, which is really about fragmentation and essentially fragmentation is kind of the enemy of everybody. If you can argue well, the travel agents don't really want fragmentation. The airlines want a little bit of differentiation, but massive fragmentation doesn't probably help them either because the technology isn't there. But how do we help? How do you help the airlines get to a better spot where there's less fragmentation and innovation can take place? You have to have both.

Brett: That's right. Yeah. You know, I referenced some of this yesterday morning in in my address. But fragmentation, that is where ATPCO really excels, right? Defining not like a standard offer, for example, but a standard set of data to convey your offer. And so as the industry finds new ways, new products to offer, new ways to offer them. new ways to reach the traveler. We haven't talked about  AI or agentic AI yet, but as that channel develops, there's going to be a risk again of more fragmentation, and things are moving really quickly. And so, ATPCO, our teams are working hard and trying to work ahead of those developments to think through where might fragmentation increase as a result and put the right frameworks into place. That's something that we've always been really good at.

Richard: I see there aren't many shopping engines that operate at size and scale. How can you help the shopping engines become better at what they do, and keep them focused on their job and keep them aligned to the industry? Do you see any role for ATPCO in that?

Brett: I think so, as you think about how shopping works today, we've heard almost every panel on the stage where we talked about shopping has talked about how inefficient that process is. And I've believed for a long time that something that leads shopping with attribute-based search results would be a lot more efficient. You could just reduce your search space from the very beginning and generate more targeted results. Today, most shopping results are still priceless, right? And so that is that's both no longer what travelers are expecting to see and also no longer what technology can support in an efficient way. And so something's got to change about the way search happens. And I think that the data that we provide can really enable that we have those attributes in Routehappy. We have all of the terms and conditions and rules and contracts in our fare filings. And I think AI will actually make it easier to have more targeted searches rather than generating results that cover the entire search space.

Richard: Right. And I think everybody's nervous about the fact that letting loose agentic on top of an existing infrastructure, with look to books and so on, could explode. But there's a whole bunch of people like us that think, actually it goes both ways.

Brett: Yeah, I think so.

Richard: So there's some efficiency that gets introduced, and there's some inefficiencies in the current structure and current systems and so on.

Brett: Yeah, I think that's right. I mean, if we carry today's shopping paradigm into an agentic search future, I don't know how that works at scale.  

Richard: Right. Brigit, I don't know if everybody can see Brigit's presentation was excellent, by the way, and brilliant with Chris. She talked about inspiration, and I was kind of trying to lead you on the other side of things that are very important for them to catch the inspiration, be able to work against that. And then Tom used this brilliant example of Fargo, by the way, I did while I was sitting there. I went, " That's a great idea, Tom" and I said "Where can I go kiteboarding in July for a moderate?" and it came back with Mauritius. So I'm off to Mauritius. Apparently both British Airways and Emirates fly there. No schedule, but that's where I'm on my way. How do you see your role in that? Can you help them with that? Is standardization the only way you can help them, or kiteboarding destinations isn't one of the parameters in the search, but it's all, it's the only thing I care about, you know.

Brett: Yeah. Well, I think that's it's along the lines of what we were just talking about. I think the paradigm for search is going to be a traveler's expression of the experience they desire, not the O&D and the dates they want to fly and sort by price, right? And so I think the data sets that we provide to the AI is we're going to need to structure that data in a slightly different way, but using the data that we've all created already as a foundation for that.

Richard: Isn't extensibility the answer to that? Isn't your view of how you will extend the standards create some...

Brett: I think

Richard: ...transition state data, and that will allow people to have different views, but allow also AI to work intelligently against that data?

Brett: That's right. Yeah, we can call that extensibility. You know, AIs work on something called semantic values of data, and that essentially is a natural language description of what the offer is or what the fare data represents. That will be extending what we do, but it will be built on the same data foundation that we have today in a similar way that, you know, an airline can use Product Catalog and import existing offers and products from the fares that they filed as a starting point for Product Catalog. And of course you want to modify it from there because it's not perfect. But I think that's a very similar idea. We can seed that AI experience and AI consumption of offers in a similar way.

Richard: I don't think ATPCO has any issues of trust. AI is about trust. No, I don't think so. But is that something that worries you? Is that, are you thinking about that? I think there's a bunch of liability attached to AI. In other words, if I discriminate through AI, I, as the airline, become liable. And I got the data from you and I'm going to have to sit with you and say, well, in my contract I have to push some of that risk your way. Yeah, I don't want any discrimination. And, and I think that's makes a lot of people very nervous. And I think you did a great job. By the way, the research your team did was really good. So do you see any trust issues? The answer's got to be no, isn't it?

Brett: Well, I don't see trust issues with ATPCO and having said that.

Richard: Yeah, that's for them, by the way. Yeah that's not.. I believe you, but that's for them. You should trust ATPCO. Anyways that was the message I get 25 seconds to ask the last question. If we're sitting here in a few years, what's going to be different in let's...I don't know what next year is. I think next year is going to be very difficult. The fuel price is going to make a big difference to our industry and I'm sure everybody agrees with that. But what do you think in two years from now? How do you see ATPCO? How do you see the role that you will have played?

Brett: I think 2 years from now we'll... My prediction is we will start to see the beginnings of agentic commerce at scale in travel. And ATPCO will have played a vital role in making those transactions predictable, and secure, and trustworthy. Because the data that is being consumed both to present the offers and also to fulfill the booking will be made using a framework provided by ATPCO. That's what I see in two years.

Richard: Brilliant. And I think that's probably right. Thank you very much everybody for coming and for sitting through this last session. I hope you guys enjoy the demos and thanks to Brett for that.

Brett: Thank you.

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