(bright upbeat music) - One of the biggest questions that our clients are coming to us with now is how to evolve to really meet the long-term changes of COVID. So they were able to stay operational, which was no small feat during the pandemic, but a lot of the focus during that time was on managing cost, managing operations, and at the same time, the customer, the guest, you or I, was getting increasingly frustrated with the travel industry. And so there's this real challenge in the marketplace today to figure out, now that I've solved the operational problems, if I'm an operator, how do I look ahead and really better align with what guests are expecting of me and develop new products, new service lines, and new ways of managing guest engagement?
One of the biggest challenges in travel right now is labor. It's hard to find, it's more expensive than it used to be. And so travel technology is a huge business that we're advising a lot of our clients on. That could be in the back office, looking for workforce management tools and predictive analytics that can help to make things run more efficiently.
But it can also be customer facing technology, as you think about generative AI that's used for customer service or even for personalization in your loyalty program. So if you're designing a perk or a benefit, what's going to resonate with me is very different than what might resonate with you. And they can predict that based on the information that I, as a consumer, provide. As we think about what the next 40 years looks like for the travel industry, there's a lot of lessons that we can take from the past.
We've seen the pitfalls and we've seen what's a fad or an overcorrection in the marketplace. And we really push our clients to think about what are the long term trends? So we're not pivoting from every slight shift in the consumer psyche, but we're understanding what's driving that action, the why behind it. And I think having those case studies and those analogs from the past, it's a really great proof point of why something might or might not be successful in the future.
We are here to be a strategic advisor for you. That is what gets us out of bed in the morning. It's to understand the greatest challenges in the travel industry and to help solve them together. We're not going to have all the answers.
No one does, but bringing the right people into the room who are dedicated to your success, that's what I love about my job, and that's what I think I can do for our clients. (soft music)
