Modernizing Travel Experiences
The recovery in this sector has been at once slow and quick. In some cases, such as sea shipping and air transport, the recovery has been slow as those vehicles take time to load, unload and move to new locations and move products or people. In other cases, such as over the road trucking, the industry was very quick to respond and now in some cases finds itself overextended with too many vehicles and not enough product to ship.
Empowering Seamless Travel Experiences
Enhancing Customer Journeys In Travel & Transportation
The travel and transportation industry is a link for the entire economy. If the COVID-19 pandemic taught us anything, it is that we need to pay closer attention to the traveling transportation industry, as it provides us with the global economy that we have all become accustomed to.
Connecting Continents, Creating Memories: Where Every Journey Tells a Tale.
Digital Transformation
Challenge: Much of the transportation industry is still quite analog, or extremely antiquated legacy digital systems. Digital transformation can be painful because it requires the change in systems both in headquarters, in vehicles, and a retraining of employees to be able to utilize the systems. The travel and transportation industry has been lagging other industries and its digital transformation and finds itself less efficient than it could be with the current technological solutions available. Solution: Digital transformation in the travel and transportation industry will require a multi-pronged strategic approach. First, it will require a retraining of all staff. This training could utilize online services such as Learning Management Systems to provide courses and videos so that employees can be up to date on the latest technology. Second, it will require comprehensive systems integration. Legacy systems, while outdated and inefficient, contain vast amounts of data that can be used by more updated systems to make predictions, increase efficiency, and reduce overall costs. Properly integrating those systems requires the right technology to bridge the gap. Third, the industry will need to begin updating some of its vehicles. In some cases, particularly Maritime shipping, the ships are extremely outdated, no longer efficient and require very high amounts of maintenance. As these new systems are designed, they will need to integrate all of the latest technology as well as be prepared for the next generation of technology that will need to be installed into them.
Last Mile Delivery
Challenge: Consumers have grown to expect that products will be delivered to them quickly, efficiently and in a transparent manner. Last mile delivery, the last few miles between the final warehouse and the consumer's front porch, has been a challenge for a long time. In order for the shipping and transportation industry to overcome this, it's going to require a new perspective on what shipping is and what it requires. Solution: Beyond the required warehouses and shipping vehicles, last mile delivery requires an extremely transparent supply chain. It's imperative that the entire supply chain is visible not only to the company, but to the trucking companies that may hire subcontractors, and, most importantly, to the consumer. Because the systems required for a maritime shipping company are very different from the system required for a customer facing shipping tracking system, this will again require very clear integration of otherwise antagonistic systems.
Green Transportation
Challenge: All transportation, particularly maritime transportation, over the road, trucking, and air transport need to move to greener solutions. There is a move in all of these industries and in each of these modes of transportation toward electric vehicles, but adoption is slow and can be expensive. Solution: Prior to the complete replacement of the entire transportation system in the vehicles in it, AI, machine learning, and other programs can provide more efficient routes and shipping combinations so that there is less wasted motion as items and people are shipped around the world. Not all of the Legacy roots and shipping methods are as efficient as they could be. By applying artificial intelligence to the supply chain, companies can look for ways to reduce the amount of mileage that any given person or product is required to move. This includes not just international shipping, or over the road trucking, or air transportation, but it also includes public transportation within cities to find the most efficient route to service the most people.
Cybersecurity
Challenge: Cybersecurity is a concern in every industry. In the travel and transportation industry, it can be a matter of life and death. It can also be a matter of crashing an entire economy if a specific system is held ransom by cyber criminals. Solution: Cyber security can be rapidly beefed up with artificial intelligence. AI is able to look at what cyber criminals are doing, process data more quickly than any human could possibly process it, and act faster than any group of people would be capable of. Artificial intelligence can simultaneously notify stakeholders that there is a potential breach, deploy defensive technologies, and even right defensive software programs to undo the damage being done by a piece of malware or digital virus. Artificial intelligence is also able to predict what cyber criminals are going to attack next, examine systems more quickly and more thoroughly than a human to find vulnerabilities, and deliver results faster to protect the entire travel and transportation industry.
Transparent Supply Chain
Challenge: During the COVID-19 COVID-19 pandemic, we learned that our supply chain was weak and easily broken. In many cases, the chain had become extremely long and very opaque. Moving forward, the travel and transportation industry will need to have a much more transparent supply chain so that issues and concerns can be dealt with quickly and products and people can be moved as efficiently as possible. Solution: Supply chain visibility requires integrated software. Being able to integrate the shipping information, plus the order information, plus the customer facing software, and being able to deliver all of this in a data visualization that is clear, concise, and easy to understand will allow decision makers to keep the supply chain flowing smoothly and avoid log jams. Artificial intelligence can be integrated with this and notify the stakeholders of any slowdowns or potential problems.
Demand projection
Challenge: Shipping at this time in some parts of the world, including the EMEA region, there is an overabundance of supply in terms of trucks and ships and aircraft. In many cases, many of these items came online in response to the broken supply chains of the COVID-19 pandemic, but without an understanding that within a year or two the demand would shrink significantly. Solution: Using an integrated system, particularly data visualization, stakeholders will be able to move assets from one location to the other more quickly so that they have the right assets where the demand is highest. They will also be able to use historical data as well as predictive data to understand how much demand would be needed in the future and avoid the oversupply that currently exists.
Travel And Transportation Industry
2024 and beyond
The travel and transportation industry is intimately integrated into the hospitality industry. The movement of people and goods is a vital part of the global economy. After the COVID-19 pandemic, there was an immense amount of pent up need. In the movement of products and commodities, that pent-up need has been handled. For vacations, travel, and other human activities, that pent up demand still exists and is reflected in record-breaking levels of travel in Europe, the Middle East and Africa.
