Pornsri Chotiwit, Director of Revenue, Thai Airways International, shares the common challenges for businesses in the air travel industry and how Thai Airways overcame them.
We needed to change to cater to hyper-personalisation and digitalisation.
We’ve adapted our mobile application to be user-friendly because we think that right now most people book using their mobile phones. Before that, we used our website, but now with the mobile application, users can check everything; booking online and the payment until users complete their journeys.
Payment is very important for us. When we have the passengers booking online and if they cannot complete the payment, we can see an unsuccessful payment rate of around 20%.
We use dynamic pricing to check and cater to the passenger details in real-time and then when they make the booking to complete the journey, they make the payment. If the payment is unsuccessful, we’ll need to send the cue message to them to make the booking with us again.
Global payment is very important for Thai Airways. We connect to many platforms that support global payment with us.
Cross-border payment – this one is an issue that we (as an industry) need to fix. Sometimes the passengers use their own local credit card or bank card that Thai Airways cannot accept, and we need make sure the card payment can be completed.
And then there’s the foreign exchange rate, the multi-currency issue. Passengers can make the booking online on different platforms, with online travel agents (OTAs) or directly with an airline website.
Then the multi-currency issue. If the passenger can see foreign exchange rate, they can use the local currency to make the payment. For example, if they travel from Europe to Thailand, and the payment they can choose like Euro as a currency or they can choose Pounds as a currency. They can choose any currency that they want.
If they make the booking, localisation means that they can also use their own preferred payment option when they make the booking. Personalisation means for the baggage, the seating, the travel insurance, they can make the ancillary product purchases and complete the payment, it's a success for us.
I think this is really important for Thai Airways. During the pandemic, most of the staff across many companies, they need to resign from the company because of the policy of the company to save costs. Thai Airways couldn’t fly anywhere. We stopped our operations. We needed to adapt very fast and also to reinvent many things. When we adapt, we need to do quickly and do every function. When we do that, we make sure it’s not siloed. Unlike the past, where there were siloed departments, we need to connect many departments to complete projects.