Northstar

An interview with Robert Bailey President and chief executive officer, Abacus International Abacus has been instrumental in its role as a global distribution system, crucial for agents to manage the modernday corporate business travellers. It is the technological catalyst that allows for improved productivity and efficiency, essential for the travel and MICE trade. Last month, Abacus held its bi-annual Abacus International Conference which saw many planners and agents alike, convene together to gather the latest solutions developed and programmed by the company. We caught up with its president and CEO, Robert Bailey to find out more about his views on how the technology scene has changed throughout the years. Q: You were born in Malaysia, and spent your earlier years in Australia. How was it like growing up in this part of the world? That is right, I was born in Kuching, Sarawak and I actually grew up all over the world. Five years in New Zealand, some period in South Africa, and Papua New Guinea. I was schooled and educated in the United Kingdom. Q: Having been bitten by the travel bug since you were young, what would you say is the biggest change in this sector, particularly in the use of technology? I guess travel has always been technologically driven, so the biggest change is probably the internet, in one word being – massive. The other is that in aircraft that can go a long way. We are seeing that almost reversing, the increase in the list of carriers, reintroducing hubbing places between Europe and Asia. When I was growing up, we used to fly and the aircraft used to stop all over places, stopping like a float, between Asia and UK, now you can fly long haul, but we’re getting back to stopping and hubbing in the Middle Eastern. So, it’s quite an interesting evolution. Whilst the technology in the aircraft can fly the distance, the travel routine calls for an interesting observation. I would say internet and computing, they are both linked and the more recent one is the mobility one and obviously that was part of the theme for AIC as well. Q: You mentioned that there’s some sort of irony for South Korea in a way, given that it has the fastest wireless internet speed. What is the irony and what are they actually lacking? The irony now is that Korea’s the market pioneer for broadband wireless which at the time is being talked about in mobile telecommunications - about being another generation away from 3G. So there’s this talk about 4G, and now we’re approaching the point where 4G networks are becoming a reality. Korea’s had broadband wireless across most of the country for a number of years already, that gives great Wi-fiaccess and one of the common sights and observations I’ve made, with some of the travel agencies operating here is, it’s kind of interesting. It’s a bit of a paradox, for such a wired society where the wireless connectivity is pervasive, that the travel business is still relatively conservative and relatively offline, given the relative penetration of the technology. And it comes down to cultural aspects in the way that businesses are run, in the way that people expect services to be delivered. So there’s kind of a mismatch there but I think the gap is narrowing. It’s an interesting observation because what I see is one of the most technologically-advanced country and region, isn’t matching in its travel booking process. Q: Speaking of culture and services, I noticed that your team recently launched an automation programme. Do you think that will actually encourage the lack of human touch in terms of travel agents providing service? No, I think it will promote the human touch because what it’ll do is free up travel agents and consultants from doing administrative and fulfilment work which is transactional and allow them to spend time on client servicing and the higher value added elements of the agencies made so it actually should boost capacity to service clients and create loyalty and get more value add into the mix and presumably get high profitability so the idea is to improve their productivity and efficiency to free up the expensive resorts and manpower effectively, to do high-end and high-value activities. So it’s the exact opposite. Q: The Abacus International Conference is in its eighth year. What kind of changes have you seen? We do this every other year, getting the sort of quality in the level of participants, to take a time out. And we are very respectful of their time, which is why we need to add a lot of value to justify people being out of office for long periods of time. For the next AIC, we are probably going to see more rapid evolution in the mobile space – how did this compare to the last AIC? For the AIC 2010, we prototyped apps for mobile which was outside of the conference and we also showed other mobile applications and the feedback was wow. We’ve developed the full mobile integration switch, so we have quite a lot to formalise the portfolio and put a wrap around it. Q: What is the biggest challenge for you as the CEO and president of Abacus? I think here in Asia, it’s a choppy business environment, having to respond very rapidly to crisis or natural disasters, so you have to be pretty resilient and you have to be, I’d say, pretty confident in getting your teams motivated so you can ride through those ups and downs. So you focus on what is core to the business, the surprising thing here is, how quickly and how resilient our customer base is, and keeping that in mind making sure that you keep your customer and their needs out there, through all these distractions in these market generations. That’s a big challenge and it’s great. Hopefully we do a good enough job on it and we continue to focus there.

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