The Future of Air Travel

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Voix off féminine
You. Hello. We are team B9, and this is how we came up with Travel & Care. It all started with some research about future travelers.

Who are they? What do they want? And most importantly, what is their relationship with traveling?

And this is what we got from our interviews:

Nicole
I loved taking the plane, beyond being a convenient transportation method, it is also an exciting activity itself: the food, the comfort, the view and the overall experience onboard is just really fun and enjoyable.

I'm not really worried about COVID-19 since I'm young and healthy. I'm just frustrated not to be able to travel again.

Being locked down for so long has made me reconsider new, closer destinations like Greece or Spain for example.

Voix off féminine
This led us to create our target persona:
Nicole is 24, she lives in France and she's a student. She enjoys trying new things and likes to share it on social media. She is ecoconscious and actively trying to minimize her carbon footprint. She's frustrated by COVID crisis and she cannot wait to be able to travel again. She's not particularly afraid of COVID considering her young age. And she loves to take the plane and enjoys the flight experience.

So to sum it up, Nicole has a lot of free time with a very limited budget, which means there's an opportunity to use this time to create an asset valuable to the consumers, airlines and the planet. And this is how we created our Travel and Care program.

Travel and Care is a loyalty program for young travelers who want to explore the world but do not yet have a stable financial situation. Their task is to complete missions for environmental organizations in exchange for points added to their personal customer account. Users can pick missions available near their location with airline partners, environmental organizations or charities. They can earn points depending on the time and difficulty of the mission. For example, beach or street cleaning, charity support, tree planning, et cetera. Now for the fun part. After earning enough points, users can use them to plan their next trip. Depending on the number of points earned, they have access to more or less premium advantages. For example, under 1000 points they could have an access to the lounge or a more baggage allowance. From 1000 point they could have discounts on booking, and from 5000 points they would have business class offers for examples. Now each user has their own personal dashboard with an overview of their activity, number of missions completed, their travel cash balance or their destination wish list. And anything can be shared on social media.

To register a mission, users have to get the confirmation form from the organization they worked for. Then they use their smartphone to scan the QR code on the form and add it to their account.

And voila.

Now the points are added to their travel cash balance.

Now why is it a financially stable project? Before COVID-19, European students had on average 4.2 travels planned per year. This number dropped down to one as a result of the pandemic. What Travel and Care would do is that it would impact the demand on flights by increasing travel frequency among young students.

The result planes would be flying at higher capacities which would reduce the operation costs caused by empty seats. After a one year financial projection using the main revenues and cost drivers breakeven is attained only six months after initial investments. Gross margin of the project is 1% and is expected to increase in the medium term. In the long run, there will be an impact on the loyalty of these travelers. Given the early work on acquisition and retention strategies, this new generation is highly conscious of their actions impact on the environment. Having the ability to compensate their carbon emissions with their actions will also result in a greater social purpose and improve airlines brand Images.

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Female voice-over
Each day, billions of people get through airports to eat, shop and look for entertainment. However, due to COVID-19, our behavior have changed and so did our way of traveling. To avoid as much as possible passengers contact, they need to stay on the waiting areas. But it's not that simple. To do so, we have to tackle two pain points.

First of all, food. As we all know, passengers like to eat before the flight, and this represents a high revenue for airports. However, during COVID-19, it's no longer possible to have all restaurants open. Sitting at a table or even going on a Click and Collect is the best way to create long queues new restaurants. This is not desirable during COVID-19.

That's why we will offer a delivery service. We've all already experienced the empty Terminal D while our favorite fast food was on the Terminal A, isn't it? This is why all airport restaurants will be delivered where you are seated, and this not depending on where the boarding gate is located or which restaurants are nearby. At the first step, those deliveries will be made by persons currently unemployed due to decreases. On the second step, it will be autonomous deliveries using small electric vehicles.

Unfortunately, food won't solve everything. We need to entertain our passengers to make sure they are not moving too much within the airport. On the app, they will have access to wide offer of readings, videos and other content, all adapted to time passengers ads before the boarding time to have relevant content. It will be partnerships Spotify for music, Script for audiobooks, Stitcher for podcasts, and Ted for conferences. Once on this app, passenger will receive a notification when it's time to present himself to the boarding desk.

To avoid crossing too many people, the back of the plane will receive the notification before the front seats. All airports already have their own app, so our solution is to extend it in order to help passengers stay at their place. But it goes beyond offering an extra. This solution will be a real incentive for people to download the app and thereby enter their data. So, are you ready to get on board?

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Indian male voice-over
You our target audience. Business travelers lead a luxurious lifestyle, are members of the best lounges, and are on the frequent flyer list of several companies. They are more and more aware of the huge environmental footprint of their lifestyle and are interested in the ecofriendly luxury experience. In a recent BCG survey of more than 3000 people across eight countries, it was found that about 70% of participants. Were more aware now than before the pandemic that human activity threatens the climate and the environment, and about 40% reported that they intend to adopt more sustainable behavior in the future.

Also, lounge access at airports has seen an uptick after the pandemic. Seven out of ten passengers are willing to pay to access it, and about 57% of them plan to use their airport lounge access more than they did before the pandemic.

So the objective of our project is to create an ecoresponsible lounge. We propose this solution for airport and airline lounges. We are Green lounges independent partners driving lounges towards a much greener transition. Firstly, we will rethink the energy management in lounges to reduce the consumption of energy.

Then, for the passengers, we will be providing an array of ecoresponsible services such as ecofriendly themed decor, sustainably curated food menu by world famous chefs using seasonal and local produce, gyms with green sport machines, sustainable cutlery and furniture. For each traveler using our lounge services, money would be donated to environmental organizations to offset the carbon emissions generated by the air journey. All of this will be done keeping in mind security requirements at the airport.

Our idea of offering a green lounge will be technologically feasible in a short span of time. We will be using the following technological innovations to make the lounge ecofriendly. Intelligent WiFi water leak detectors that will allow the lounge to save water gray water system using the water from sinks for washrooms to avoid waste if the airport is near the sea.

Then a green AC system to pump naturally cold water from the depths of the sea to supply the lounge's air conditioning systems a Pathogen zone with pads on the floor that convert kinetic energy from walking into storable electricity and an e-board smart table capable of producing green energy through artificial light. Our business model for the first year would be a BtoB one focusing on business travelers wherein we sell the green lounge services to corporate companies. An advantage here is that this would be tied to the CSR of these companies.

But since there's a huge chunk of premium leisure travelers who would be willing to avail the service, we would also start expanding to them. Once we create our own green lounges. They would be directly able to reserve seats using the smartphone app. To simplify the implementation, we would first focus our efforts on France and then expand to other EU countries and then to other continents.

Now talking about numbers, here's the PNL summary for the year 2021, and 2025. Our main costs include renovation and maintenance, marketing and advertising, employee salary, rented space in Lounges, donations to ecological causes, and other operational and admin costs. Our main revenue streams are the monthly free from companies in our BtoB business commissions from Lounges, advertising revenue inside the Green Lounge, business and data consulting services for Lounges, and reservation charges for the BtoC business. We plan to scale our business general, creating a revenue of about €35 million by the year five of operations, netting a pretax profit of about €6.8 million. We also expect to have about 1.5 million business and premium leisure travelers on our platform by the end of 2025.

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