Kenya Airports Authority (KAA) chief executive Jonny Anderson has announced that he will quit from the helm of the parastatal on September 30, before the expiry of his term in November.

The shock resignation brings to an end his turbulent reign at the authority which began in July 2016.

Mr Anderson told KAA workers in a memo seen by the Business Daily on Friday that he would quit his position in the next one month, citing “personal reasons.”

‘I would like to take this opportunity to inform you that I have taken the decision not to pursue the decision of renewal my contract with KAA. This is after deep reflection and consolation with my family.

“I will be proceeding on leave on September 30, with my tenure ending on November 21, 2019. I will take fond memories of the authority, colleagues, and the incredible journey with me in my heart,” Mr Anderson said.

KAA chairman Isaack Awuondo confirmed the exit in a separate memo to staff. He credited Anderson for strengthening airports operations for the period he has been at the helm of the organisation.

“Over the three years that Jonny has been at the helm of the authority he has strengthened airport operations and overseen a period of growth in passenger numbers and the number of airlines flying to Kenya,” said Mr Awuondo.

Anderson joined the authority in July 2016 from Avinor AS in Norway where he was the national airports director. He replaced acting managing director Yatich Kangugo.

His appointment brought to an end a protracted recruitment process that was characterised by claims of political interference.

Mr Andersen was picked after trouncing five other candidates, including Mr Kangugo who emerged a distant fifth in the interviews.

Interview score sheets show that Mr Andersen scored 88 per cent while Mr Kangugo, who served as airport manager at Eldoret International Airport, scored 63 points.

He has had a rough path for the period he has been with the authority.

For instance, last July, MPS gave him the last chance to provide documents justifying the cancellation of the Sh64.5 billion Greenfield terminal project at Jomo Kenyatta International Airport.

National Assembly’s Public Investments Committee (PIC) warned the KAA management lead by Mr Anderson that it would declare them hostile witnesses if all documents surrounding the procurement of a Chinese contractor were not tabled in Parliament on time.

PIC chairman Abdulswamad Nassir said Parliament would have no other option than to direct investigative agencies, including the Directorate of Criminal Investigations, to seize the documents from KAA.

Safaricom has partnered with Travelport, a leading travel reservation provider, to enable travel consultants and agents to directly bill and invoice through M-pesa.

Marking a global first, the integration will empower more than 800 travel agencies to simplify travel payments, book clients’ trips, hotel accommodation, hire transport and conveniently pay by M-PESA.

“Today’s development brings the speed and convenience of M-PESA to Travelport, the more than 800 travel agents they serve, and their customers. We are pleased that the travel industry is set to benefit from increased efficiency and ease of doing business, reducing the time and effort it takes to make bookings and reservations,” said Michael Joseph, chief executive officer, Safaricom.

By fully automating booking and ticketing the solution eradicates the previous need for agents to manually reconcile customer reservations on the Travelport platform. It further enables more agents to easily accept M-PESA as a cashless payment choice which in turn means they can reach more potential customers.

“Our commerce platform aims to offer the ultimate travel experience for today’s connected digital age. Having M-PESA as a payment choice enables our travel agents to effectively tailor their products to meet the demands of the modern traveller,” said Nita Nagi, Regional Manager, Travelport.

Some of the travel agencies in Kenya that have integrated their systems with Travelport include Carlson Wagonlit Travel Kenya, FCm Travel Solutions Kenya, Incentive Travel, Acharya Travel and Travel N’ Style.

Safaricom’s deal with Travelport marks the second such in the last three months. In May, Safaricom partnered with BuuPass to enable online booking and payment for bus ticketing through M-PESA.

The growing uptake of the service in the travel sector comes amidst preference for mobile payments.

Data from the Central Bank of Kenya shows that mobile payments were the most preferred form of cashless payments in the country, accounting for more than 90 percent of such payments in April 2019.

Uganda national carrier has been relaunched amid pomp and colour after being liquidated 40 years ago as a result of mismanagement and public debt.

Ugandans celebrated the move as the airliner made its maiden flight to Nairobi this Wednesday August 28, 2019.

After Nairobi, other destinations that the airline will fly to include Mogadishu, Juba and Dar es Salaam then to then to Mombasa, Kilimanjaro and Bujumbura. Eventually, the airline intends to launch direct long-haul routes to China and other Asian countries whose tourists Uganda is keen to attract.

The revival plan faced criticism from various quarters in in the Ugandan Central Bank as it was to cost Ushs 575 billion (Kshs 16 billion).

The country now has two new Bombardier CRJ 900 jets and will receive two others in September, while the addition of two Airbus A330-800 planes in 2020 will allow it to launch the long-haul flights.

The price for air ticket from Uganda, Entebbe, to Kenya, Nairobi, is approximately Kshs 28, 684 ($278) for a return trip and Kshs 14, 342 for a one-way ticket.

The role of travel agents is constantly being questioned especially now when information is accessible online.

However, their part in the travel industry cannot be underscored particularly by the traveller who wants peace of mind as they travel.

A lot of information comes up every day on why a traveller should not rely on a travel agent and instead go online and book a holiday and hotels for themselves.

This is terrible advice, says the Kenya Association of Travel Agents (KATA) Chief Executive Officer Mr. Nicanor Sabula.

Vacationers, he says are not guaranteed of cheap and affordable vacations when the book their flights and hotels directly.

 “There is so much information online and trying to sieve through it all to come out with an itinerary is chaotic. I would advise a traveller to make their search and share the information with their agent in order to get personalised services. The travel agent will also be in a position identify actual and false packages and protect the client from cons” Mr Sabula added.

He urged travellers to use KATA accredited agents as they are bound by a code of ethics that assures one of integrity and professionalism in the business.

“When booking directly, one lacks the security that comes with having an accredited travel agent take care of the travel plans. It is therefore easy for one to fall into the wrong hands and end up with no holiday and no money,” he pointed out.

Like every other industry, there are bad seeds that reap where they have not sown and that is why a travel agent comes in and buffers the traveller.

Ms Rosemary Wanjiku, a frequent traveller to Dubai for business says that she must use a travel agent to prepare her itinerary before each travel.

“The first time I booked directly I was so disappointed. I lost my luggage and the hotel I booked was nothing like I saw online. I tried following up and it only cost me more money. Now I leave everything with my agent and I have realised that I save more time and money and enjoy the convenience,” she said.

She further noted that travel agents have access to information on the best service rates from airlines, car hires and hotels and they can steer one towards deals and promotions therefore saving one time.

A travel agent is with the traveller from the beginning of the vacation to the end, ensuring that their client receives a personalised experience and value for their money.

Passport applicants are now required to book an appointment through the eCitizen portal for passport collection.

This was announced by the Department of Immigration on August 29, 2019 through a notice informing the public that they can only collect the passports from where their biometrics were taken, after making an appointment.

This is in a bid to reduce congestion and improve service delivery at the passport centers.

“With the booking system, you will not have to queue for hours to collect your passport,” read the statement.

Applicants seeking to collect already processed passports are required to carry an appointment slip, original Identification Card and the expired or old passport for those making replacements.

Earlier in the week, the immigration department introduced the appointment system for e-Passports.

The notice to the public stated that only those with appointments will be allowed to make passport applications and take biometrics at the passport processing centers.

“You will henceforth be required to book an appointment in the eCitizen portal. Specify the date, time and station of your convenience,” the notice read.

Those who have already made applications for passports will also be required to revisit the portal and book appointments indicating time, date and station.

However, sick people with urgent appointments to travel out of the country for medical reasons will be exempted from making an appointment.

Other people exempted from making appointments include students on scholarships that require immediate travel, public servants on urgent assignments and business executives on urgent official business.

People seeking exemption will have to produce evidence to prove their urgency.

The 35th East African Community (EAC) Council of Ministers issued a directive requiring all member states to begin the issuance of the new East Africa e-Passport by January 31, 2018.

This saw massive congestion at passport centers as Kenyans strived to beat the August 31, 2019. The deadline was nevertheless extended to March 1, 2020 allowing Kenyans to use their old passports until then.

Kenya Airways (KQ) this week released it’s half-year results posting a loss of Ksh 8.56 billion.

The loss in the period ended June 30, 2019, was attributed to the investment in their new routes, the return of two wide-body aircrafts and other operational costs.

The national carrier however recorded a 12.2 percent increase in revenue due to the new routes. Revenue for the first half increased to Kshs. 58.55 billion from Kshs. 52.19 billion compared to the same period last year.

The results were relayed during an investor briefing on Tuesday, August 27, where the KQ board and management expressed optimism that the strategic investment initiatives the airline has been implementing in the turnaround program for the past two years are progressively paying off.

KQ board Chairman Michael Joseph noted, “We continue to steer the business away from the previous headwinds, steadily digging it out of the historic loss of Ksh. 25 billion posted in 2014. As at the end of 2018, the losses had narrowed by over 250%. This is a testament of our commitment to turnaround Kenya Airways”.

KQ CEO and Managing Director Mr Sebastian Mikosz pointed out that the Nairobi- New York route that was launched in October 2018 has exceeded expectations and continues to receive positive passenger uptake.

He added that KQ’s strategic network expansion is still going on with the airline having recently secured codes to fly to Canada and Beijing.

“Despite the tough market environment, we are making positive strides which involve resource optimization and the robust growth approach we have taken in this very competitive marketplace. Some of these investments may deny us, our shareholders and stakeholders the coveted bottom-line numbers, but we have our eyes on the bigger picture,” Chairman, Michael Joseph added.

Safaricom PLC has partnered with Travelport, a leading travel reservation provider, to enable travel consultants and agents to directly bill and invoice on the M-PESA platform.

Marking a global first, the integration will empower more than 800 travel agencies to simplify travel payments, book clients’ trips, hotel accommodation, hire transport and conveniently pay by M-PESA.

“Today’s development brings the speed and convenience of M-PESA to Travelport, the more than 800 travel agents they serve, and their customers. We are pleased that the travel industry is set to benefit from increased efficiency and ease of doing business, reducing the time and effort it takes to make bookings and reservations,” said Safaricom CEO Michael Joseph.

By fully automating booking and ticketing, the solution eradicates the previous need for agents to manually reconcile customer reservations on the Travelport platform. It further enables more agents to easily accept M-PESA as a cashless payment choice which in turn means they can reach more potential customers.

“Our commerce platform aims to offer the ultimate travel experience for today’s connected digital age. Having M-PESA as a payment choice enables our travel agents to effectively tailor their products to meet the demands of the modern traveller,” said Nita Nagi, Regional Manager, Travelport.

Some of the travel agencies in Kenya that have integrated their systems with Travelport include Carlson Wagonlit Travel Kenya, FCm Travel Solutions Kenya, Incentive Travel, Acharya Travel and Travel N’ Style.

The deal between Safaricom and Travelport marks the second such in the last three months.

In May, Safaricom partnered with BuuPass to enable online booking and payment for bus ticketing through M-PESA.

The growing uptake of the service in the travel sector comes amidst preference for mobile payments.

Data from the Central Bank of Kenya shows that mobile payments were the most preferred form of cashless payments in the country, accounting for more than 90 percent of such payments in April 2019.

Source: https://sokodirectory.com/2019/08/travel-agents-to-reap-big-in-safaricom-travelport-partnership/

New Distribution Capability (NDC) standards, introduced by the International Air Transport Association (IATA) promise to enable smarter retailing through indirect distribution channels such as Global Distribution Systems (GDS). This means that GDSs will be able to show and sell offers that can be branded, differentiated with rich content, and personalized to drive higher conversions.

As more companies within the airline distribution ecosystem adopt NDC standards, airline retailing solutions must be able to support these growing volumes without compromising the customer experience or disrupting operations. In addition, a variety of other stakeholders involved in fulfilling and servicing these orders — not just airlines directly involved with offer and order management — must be able to support NDC sales.

Sabre, a travel technology company and one of the larger GDSs in the industry, reports that it produces 300 terabytes of shopping data every day, which roughly translates to 600 million shops a day. “When somebody enters the search parameters into our system, it takes us under two seconds to produce all the possible results and combine them into the most favorable offer for travelers,” said Brett Burgess, senior vice president of product management for Sabre Travel Network. “As we think about NDC and airline retailing, the most important thing to do is to continue to deliver the same level of efficiency and service at scale with NDC connections as well.”

“From our perspective, we need to make sure that our NDC-compliant connections — also called NDC Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) — can support those 600 million shops a day,” said Kathy Morgan, vice president for NDC solutions at Sabre. Without scale, the promise of NDC to open up the marketplace to new types of airline offers, rich content, retailing, and differentiation cannot be fulfilled.

Addressing Challenges as an Industry

Along with providing scalable NDC-enabled solutions, the industry must address some other challenges as well. “We must recognize that we are dealing with under-specified standards. Initially, these standards only addressed what a reservation workflow would look like for an airline’s brand website, and that worked well for meta-search engines and online travel agencies (OTAs),” said Morgan. “But, scale includes both business and technical considerations, and when you open up the market to other third-party buyers like travel management companies and corporate travel booking tools, these standards don’t address all their needs. We’re excited to see that IATA acknowledged industry feedback and created NDC Level 4 and NDC@Scale certifications. Through our test-and-learn approach, we look forward to sharing insights that can refine the definition of scale.”

IATA has set an industry-wide goal that 20 percent of all sales for the 21 airlines on the NDC leaderboard should be powered by an NDC API by 2020. These 21 airlines account for 30 percent of IATA passenger volumes. The fact that world passenger volume has exceeded 4.5 billion as of June 2019 is an indication of the kind of volume that NDC APIs must be able to support.

In early April 2019, Sabre announced that it had begun testing NDC offers with United Airlines. “United is thrilled to be the first airline to partner with Sabre to offer NDC capabilities through their booking platform as we continue to advance the travel industry,” said Dave Bartels, vice president of revenue management for United Airlines. “We strive to provide the best experience for our customers at each step of their travel journey, including when they shop for flights. Working with Sabre to improve the booking process is another way we are able to enhance the experience for our customers.”

Driving Scale for all Functions in the Workflow

Managing and supporting large volumes of shops and transactions through NDC APIs are not the only things to consider when thinking about scale. Are other service providers, like payment fulfillment platforms and catering vendors, able to understand the new NDC offer and order model and handle the resulting volumes coming through NDC channels as well as traditional channels? “NDC changes how tickets and ancillaries are sold,” said Michael Reyes, senior director, offer management at Sabre Airline Solutions. “We can build and sell the offer, but we must also pay attention to what happens after the sale.”

For example, when ancillaries like special meal requests are booked more frequently through an NDC-enabled API, a catering vendor’s system must be upgraded to process and fulfill these orders. Therefore, NDC adopters must look at the entire retailing process, including at how the offer will be fulfilled, how the customer will be supported in case of changes after the order is placed, and how third-party vendors are kept informed to successfully achieve scale.

Airline Considerations

“Today, Sabre has the computing power to support 600 million shops with 99.999 percent uptime,” said Morgan. “Our shopping volumes double every 18 months, and the look-to-book ratios are 20,000 to one in some markets. And, it’s constantly growing. NDC will require us to transition the burden of computing and managing these volumes to the airline systems.” Not only do airline systems need to be prepared to handle the increased volume, they must do so while maintaining the current service standards. Otherwise, airlines may risk losing customers due to unmet expectations.

To achieve scale, “The first thing we are doing is changing the notion that airlines can only take a limited number of attributes into account when building an offer,” said Reyes. New NDC-enabled solutions from Sabre ensure that airlines can distribute any number of offers through their systems that take attributes such as ancillaries, availability, and schedules into consideration, enabling them to be smarter retailers.

“This is where I see the GDS and players like Sabre to be key,” said Charlene Wee, manager of distribution for Singapore Airlines. “There are only a certain number of things airlines can do on their own. Can you imagine us going to 1,000 different partners and setting up 1,000 different connections? It’s not possible or scalable. Once we have the GDSs on board, we have connections to thousands of players out there.”

Some travel agencies using Sabre, such as Carlson Wagonlit Travel (CWT), are testing new technologies that allow them to sell offers delivered through NDC APIs using their existing shopping applications. “While some change in operations is expected, we have been focused on minimizing the disruption that NDC content might cause a travel agency’s existing workflows,” said Morgan.

“Sabre’s approach is very different compared to the other GDSs and, we believe, more scalable,” said Wee. “The key aspect is that it requires less changes to the agency workflows, driving higher adoption. We want to be a part of making NDC a reality by helping facilitate between the airlines and agents. If we do things in a way that would drive agency adoption, then we are happy to understand how the workflows should change on our side. Ultimately, it’s not just us wanting to distribute NDC content, it’s about us partnering with agencies to distribute all this rich, new content.”

To truly benefit from the increased retailing potential that NDC promises, the travel industry must take an ‘ecosystem’ approach to building and deploying solutions. This means developing scalable solutions that support the needs of disparate stakeholders — from travel agencies, airlines, and corporate booking tools to mid-and back-office technology providers, corporations, and travelers themselves. “NDC might have started off as an airline-led initiative, but our approach to ushering in this new era of retailing is to leverage our position as a technology provider at the center of this ecosystem and create an expansive marketplace with solutions that can be scaled,” said Morgan.

This content was created collaboratively by Sabre and Skift’s branded content studio,SkiftX.

Source: https://skift.com/2019/08/28/scalability-is-key-to-driving-adoption-of-new-distribution-capability-standards/

The Vice President of the Universal Federation of Travel Agents Associations (UFTAA) who is also the CEO of the Israeli Incoming Tour Operators Association Yossi Fatael is among the keynote speakers confirmed to speak at the forthcoming 2019 KATA Convention set for 27-29 September 2019 in Naivasha, Kenya.

The veteran aviation professional is a respected authority on IATA matters and represents UFTAA at the joint global forum of travel agents and airlines (PAPGJC). He will be speaking on the various changes happening in the industry such as the migration to IATA NEWGEN ISS, NDC, One Order and other structural changes happenings within IATA and how the same is set to affect travel agents.

“As KATA we are immensely privileged and honored to be welcoming to our annual convention a speaker of the calibre of Yossi Fatael”, said Chairman Mohammed Wanyoike. “He is a highly experienced and knowledgeable professional on IATA matters and as we plan to transition to NEWGEN ISS in October of this year, our members will greatly benefit from his insights.”

Other keynote speakers expected to deliver speeches at the Convention include Raphael Kuuchi, the IATA Special Envoy on Aero-political affairs, Bernard Bankole, President of the National Association of Nigerian Travel Agents (NANTA) among others.  The CEO of KATA Nicanor Sabula is impressed by the number of participants registering for the convention and he says he looks forward to a successful event. “We have received registrations even from our neigbouring countries Uganda, Tanzania and Rwanda and I am happy to report that a delegation from Nigeria will also be attending the convention for the first time,” he adds.

The KATA Convention is an annual forum that brings together travel professionals from the travel ecosystem which include travel agents, airlines, travel technology companies, regulators, financial institutions, insurance companies, training institutions among others to caucus on matters related to the industry and share knowledge and experiences. It offers participants a great platform for socializing and networking with colleagues in the industry. The theme for this year’s event is “Travel in Transition: Re-imagining the future of Kenya’s travel industry.” 

More details about registration for the conference click here and for registration click here