Ryanair's CEO Michael O’Leary.
Over the last couple of years, Ryanair has pledged numerous times to become the ‘Amazon of travel’. In 2015, CEO Michael O’Leary said he wanted the airline to offer hotel bookings and Trip-Advisor style reviews and last year the company launched ‘Ryanair Rooms’, ‘Ryanair Holidays’, and a car-hire service. All of these measures aim to incentivise customers to book package holidays directly from Ryanair. The airline now aims to go beyond package holidays though. Last month CMO Kenny Jacobs announced that
Over the last couple of years, Ryanair has pledged numerous times to become the ‘Amazon of travel’. In 2015, CEO Michael O’Leary said he wanted the airline to offer hotel bookings and Trip-Advisor style reviews and last year the company launched ‘Ryanair Rooms’, ‘Ryanair Holidays’, and a car-hire service.
All of these measures aim to incentivise customers to book package holidays directly from Ryanair. The airline now aims to go beyond package holidays though. Last month CMO Kenny Jacobs announced that it plans to sell partner airlines’ flights, stating ‘It’ll be like putting your products on Amazon’.
When you think about Amazon, it is truly a marketplace. Part of its success is down to delivering exceptional customer experience by offering a seamless buying experience. Consumers have hundreds of thousands of suppliers and products all in one place. Perhaps most importantly, Amazon has developed a seamless, one-click payment process which makes it an incredibly attractive partner to sellers and partners as well as to consumers.
While Ryanair has begun building up content on its website, it still very much a single supplier and hasn’t created a marketplace as such. Allowing different airlines to advertise on its website is a step towards this but it also needs to look at the background processes such as payments, which will allow it to offer a seamless customer experience.
One of the biggest challenges with effectively supplying passengers to other airlines is the question over who ‘owns’ the customers. Airlines won’t necessarily want to bring customers onto the Ryanair marketplace, with the possibility of losing overall customer loyalty.
It remains to be seen whether Ryanair can indeed become the Amazon of travel but I welcome the effort to bring together the fragmented travel industry.
Even with market places such as Skyscanner, consumers still don’t have a seamless booking process because they still need to jump to the travel operator’s site to pay. When consumers are creating their own holidays, searching with different suppliers, this makes the process more cumbersome. It also increases the risk of fraud and the complexity in terms of financial processes, currency exchange and supplier management.
Skyscanner and Ryanair could invest in integrating different payment methods themselves. Bundling different payment methods into a wallet would simplify this, however, with this method, there are no guarantees over payment settlements and they could take a few days. The time taken in terms of systems integration would also be significant.
When dealing with different suppliers and multiple currencies, operators need a fast, easy and safe way to transact. You can have the most amazing website possible, but without the processes to back it up, there’s no way you can deliver a seamless customer experience.
Get this right – and provided other airlines are happy to get on-board – and perhaps Ryanair can realise its dream of becoming the Amazon of the travel industry.
Anthony has been Managing Director and CEO of eNett international since its inception in 2009. His career is characterised by innovation and entrepreneurial vision. Anthony has led eNett’s development from start-up to becoming one of the world’s leading travel payment companies, delivering ongoing exponential annual growth. Bringing more than 15 years of comprehensive business strategic and operational knowledge to the business, Anthony’s leadership spans the telecommunications, internet, human services, retail, financial services and travel sectors. As a founder of Optal (formerly PSP International), he combined his experience in payments and travel to create eNett International. A patriot and with a penchant for controlling the music at events, Anthony has been known to lead team huddles with a sing-along to ‘True Blue’ by John Williamson.
