TUI Group has been staffing up on technologists as it automates crucial processes, such as dealing with airport transfers and customer care. It’s all part of a wider digitization trend by Europe’s biggest holiday bundle operator.
The travel group, headquartered in Hannover, has about 600 software application designers, up from about 100 seven years earlier, stated TUI Group’s Frank Rosenberger at Skift Online Forum Europe. Lots of are working on unifying the group’s 5 innovation stacks onto one platform.
TUI Group is working with for more than 200 digital and technologist positions. Individually, it has 300 engineers at Musement, a tech subsidiary focused on trips, activities, and experiences.
TUI Group intends to “turn itself into a digital platform,” as Skift just recently reported. On the one hand, the financial investment in technology is a bit overdue, given that the business has actually an estimated 50,000-person labor force. On the other hand, TUI is now ahead of lots of hotel groups and cruise lines in acknowledging innovation’s significance by staffing appropriately.
Watch TUI Group’s Frank Rosenberger speak at Skift Forum Europe on March 24, 2022, in London.
Expanding the TUI Company Model With Software’s Help
Skift spoke a couple of weeks ago with Peter Ulwahn, TUI Musement’s chief digital officer. On March 31, Ulwahn became CEO of the TUI Musement subsidiary and a member of the TUI Group executive committee.
Musement’s strategy reflects the shapes of TUI Group’s broader growth. Musement uses more than 200,000 experiences from third-party operators through its customer company, by TUI as plan add-ons, and through resellers such as travel agencies, other tour operators, and cruise lines.
Think about Musement as a metaphor. At the big group level, TUI looking to branch out from providing its signature vertically integrated service– which funnels travelers from group-owned firms to group-operated flights, hotels, and cruise liner– to one that likewise provides travel items via 3rd parties and offers technical solutions on a business-to-business design to 3rd parties.
One part of that business strategy is for TUI Group to grow in helping other companies transfer travelers in between airports, hotels, cruise lines, and attractions.
Enhancing Tourist Transfers
One example of TUI Group’s tech technique is how it has been changing how it manages airport transfers, specifically in Spain, Greece, and Turkey.
Think about a popular destination like Mallorca, Spain. On a typical peak season day, TUI Group might have 20,000 travelers getting here around the same midday duration at the little island and needing transfers to hotels or cruise ships.
Moving that volume of guests requires a military-style operation. For context, in 2019 TUI assisted travelers with “shared transfers”– or bussing groups of visitors from hotels or cruise liner out and back.
“Worldwide, about [$ 7.1 billion] EUR6.5 billion a year is invested by travelers on shared transfers, which we currently have a substantial operation in,” Ulwahn said. “We’re currently one of the most significant service providers of what the cruise lines call ‘turnarounds.'”
TUI’s goal has actually been to boost the performance of its transfers. Pre-pandemic, it was taking groups approximately two-and-a-half hours to utilize its previous planning tool to prepare route networks and schedules.
To speed things up, TUI obtained technology from a start-up called Mobi and combined it with a system construct internally for handling services. The combined system takes mere seconds to upgrade strategies and is more precise, Ulwahn stated.
“When we introduced this in Mallorca, we had the example of four German men who didn’t get on the bus after their airplane arrived,” Ulwahn said. “They opted for beers instead. They’re generally ‘absences’ on the bus, which departs, and then the men appear. In the old practice, the personnel would take quite a while to fix the problem. In the new world, they press some buttons on their iPad in seconds and discover schedule on the next transfer.”
TUI groups are being trained on the new system in phases, allowing employees at airports, ports, and regional offices to manage transfers with tablet-based tools. By summer season 2023, TUI will use the system for all TUI transfers, consisting of expeditions.
Expanding Industries
The system’s modern versatility makes it possible for TUI to produce a little side business of offering its system as a tool for other companies to use for their own needs. It will be extensively offering the tech to 3rd parties, such as cruise lines and other trip operators quickly, Ulwahn stated.
“Our aspiration is to both increase the upsell we’re having from TUI customers but likewise provide our business-to-business customers a platform that will increase their revenue,” Ulwahn stated.
Company executives described their platform in an interview as “a cloud-based platform in an event-driven, micro-service environment with a microweb front-end user experience.” What that essentially suggests is that their system plays well with other technological systems out in the world. TUI sometimes it owns the transfer operations, often contracts out, and in some cases provides its tech to other business. So having tech systems that play well with others is very important.
TUI hopes one advantage will be a decrease in consumer confusion. About 30 percent of the calls entering its customer care centers were questions about transfers, such as arrival times.
The tech changes, particularly the more intense automation of client service issues and operations such as transfers, can’t come fast enough. It remains an open concern if Europe’s biggest travel business can remain competitive when it has basically been strained with roughly $11 billion (EUR10 billion) of gross debt.
In a brilliant area, TUI Group said in current weeks that its scheduling volume is on track to recuperate to pre-pandemic levels and that it plans to pay back the more than $4 billion it received in government assistance.
Expanding its business lines might assist in time.
“Post-pandemic we expect the transfers market will grow to possibly EUR45 billion by 2025,” Ulwahn said. “Out of that, approximately [$ 22 billion] EUR20 billion is taxis and private transfers, where we have a play that we’ll share more about in the future.”