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Mark Lenahan
Head of Retailing Strategy
Mark Lenahan is the Head of Retailing Strategy at Travelport, where he specializes in travel technology, customer experience (CX), retailing, and loyalty programs for airlines and other travel companies. He has a background in these areas and is known for his expertise in shaping strategies that enhance customer engagement and operational efficiency within the travel sector.
Lenahan is also active on social media platforms, including LinkedIn, where he has over 4,000 followers and 500+ connections. His professional profile indicates a strong focus on innovation in travel technology and customer loyalty initiatives. Additionally, he frequently speaks at industry conferences, sharing insights on the evolving landscape of travel retailing and technology.123
Highlights
I think I have finally figured out LinkedIn...
Amazon has recently started telling you how many stops away your delivery driver is. A lot like Uber sharing your driver’s location. 🚚 🚕
What’s the equivalent in travel? ✈
A lot of you – being the big airline and travel tech nerds that you are – are thinking about how you use Flightradar24 to find where the aircraft for your next flight is on its inbound journey. (easyJet even implemented this feature in their app.)
But there’s a broader modern retailing principle at play here: – – radical transparency – –
Amazon doesn’t just tell you where the truck is... From the start, they show you dozens of product photos from every angle. They provide a full list of product details (size, dimensions, colors). They display a price that won’t change during the checkout process (* excluding delivery).
** They even tell you the day the product will arrive at your house! **
Some of this is on the suppliers, but the hardest piece - the delivery date – is the result of investing $ billions in fulfillment.
So, what would radical transparency look like in travel? - The price you see is what you really pay - You understand everything you are getting and not getting - You’ve been offered the right product for your needs - You’ve seen and understood the alternatives - Every channel is consistent about product and price - You are told about problems as soon as they happen - When something goes wrong, you are offered solutions - You know what it will cost to change or cancel
What are we actually getting in travel? - Hidden fees – resort fees, cleaning fees, ad-hoc charges - “Penalties” as a source of revenue - Cryptic and inconsistent messaging - Pricing that consumers think is a blind-folded chicken at a keyboard - A diversity of "products" that are mostly just charges to remove pain - Unreadable terms and conditions, in English only - Hours of waiting in lines or telephone queues - Abandoned customers sleeping on the floor in airports
The ONLY long-term commercially sustainable business model in travel is to focus on customer lifetime value.
Anything else is a "performance marketing treadmill"(in the words of Skift), or to put it another way - a race to the bottom on price and a bidding war for every booking. That will enrich Google and nobody else.
Without an urgent injection of radical transparency, we cannot build trust.
And without trust, we cannot build lifetime value. (Travelport researched trust extensively in 2022, see https://lnkd.in/eED2MjjR )
Personalized merchandising is cool, but it isn’t all of retailing. If you think retailing is just stacking the shelf to maximize basket size – and you think Amazon is a website rather than the people driving trucks - then you really do not understand modern digital retailing.
What do YOU 👇 think radical transparency looks like in Travel?
