Dear customers,
Many unknown challenges arose in early 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic, and the impact was beyond belief. Non-essential workers were asked to take cover as borders around the world were closed and travel, both personal and business, was reduced to an all-time low. In cities, urban mobility is significantly reduced, being used mainly by essential workers and rescuers.
During the recovery phase, it is safe to expect spikes and complaints as coronavirus concerns and personal safety remain.
SAP defines the segment of the passenger and leisure travel industry by including airlines, airports, railways, hospitality, and urban mobility. For simplicity, we will refer to the overview as the travel industry.
These industry segments need to be even more cost-effective and revenue-generating by providing new and innovative services to customers at competitive prices. With the emphasis on the experience economy, guest and employee well-being will come to the fore, along with supply chain and resource management.
Companies and partner alliances that use technology to achieve these innovation goals will survive as the leaders of tomorrow.
To be successful, the travel industry must focus on four strategic priorities:
▪ Digitize customer experiences
▪ Generation of new business models
▪ Adopt intelligent operations
▪ Leverage intelligent resource management
To execute these strategic priorities, companies must change the way they operate. They need to integrate and increase the transparency of their end-to-end processes and operations and combine this with real-life awareness that includes customers and the environment. They will then need to use this information to make decisions and solve problems in new ways.
By shifting routine tasks from people to business systems enabled by machine learning and artificial intelligence, travel companies will free up the resources needed to define and pursue innovative and transformative business models.
With our Smart Enterprise framework, SAP provides the integrated suite of applications, smart technologies and digital platforms that businesses need to make this change. We have the vision, solutions and commitment to accompany you from defining your transformation strategy to providing the right solutions to manage your digital backbone in the cloud.
