This week in the travel tech industry, the first airline ticket through a blockchain has been issued. TripAdvisor has launched self-service advertising and Amadeus for Developers offers Artificial Intelligence APIs to stimulate the next wave of travel tech innovation.

Hahn Air becomes the first airline to fly a passenger holding a ticket issued via the blockchain using Winding Tree’s open-source travel distribution platform on a scheduled flight from Dusseldorf to Luxemburg.

The first “blockchain passengers” were Maksim Izmaylov, founder of Winding Tree, Davide Montali, CIO of Winding Tree, and Frederick Nowotny, head of sales engineering at Hahn Air.

Using the Winding Tree platform, Hahn Air is able to list inventory, manage the reservation requests, and receive payments once the booking process is complete. Accepted payment methods are cash, credit card, or cryptocurrency (LIF token or Ether).

Blockchain technology holds many advantages for the different parties involved in the process of booking an airline ticket:

• It is open-source, meaning all market participants such as airlines, travel companies and distribution systems can easily connect and exchange transactions.
• All market participants can directly interact with each other and perform transactions without intermediaries thereby reducing costs.
• It is 100% secure. All of the necessary information is stored in a decentralised ledger which is verified by millions of sources and therefore cannot be changed or tampered with.

“We at Hahn Air are constantly exploring new technologies and we are proud to now demonstrate our technical capability to issue blockchain-powered Hahn Air tickets. We are pleased to be partnering with Winding Tree, the most established company when it comes to distributing travel inventory in the blockchain. Our goal is to investigate and monitor the opportunities this technology holds for travel distribution, even if widespread acceptance is still a vision of the future,” Nowotny said.

TripAdvisor Media Manager is a self-service platform that empowers small and medium-sized businesses and agencies to control their own cross-platform advertising campaigns on TripAdvisor. It is available to global advertisers, supporting more than 15 currencies, and offers a wide variety of targeting options to reach their core customers.

The launch of TripAdvisor Media Manager follows the introduction of a suite of new-to-market advertising services and solutions that enable tourism and non-endemic advertisers to reach more relevant, high intent audiences on and off the TripAdvisor platform.

“We’re excited to enable local and small businesses to easily and quickly create and upload their own campaigns that they can push live on TripAdvisor in a streamlined way. The real benefit is the ability to quickly grow a business by reaching nearly 460 million loyal, engaged and connected travellers who want to hear from brands that are relevant to them,” said Christine Maguire, vice president, advertising revenue for TripAdvisor.

Designed to help individual suppliers, niche partners and advertisers reach qualified audiences, businesses can ensure their content reaches consumers through three targeting options: user location, browsed destinations or recent travel planning activities on TripAdvisor.

The intuitive, automated platform lets advertisers upload their own creative for fast TripAdvisor review and approval. The native listing format enables advertisers to build their ads directly in-platform to seamlessly fit in with the TripAdvisor mobile experience. Advertisers can set their own campaign budget and schedule, and then monitor results and adjust as needed in a real-time dashboard.

In an industry first, Amadeus makes ready-to-use, AI-driven insights and functionality available to innovators and developers, helping them create exciting new travel solutions.

Amadeus is empowering start-ups and independent developers to gain an edge by launching a new set of AI Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) as part of the Amadeus for Developers program. These APIs will allow developers to build solutions that can predict travel intent, traveller behaviour, and flight delays, amongst others – without needing any prior background in AI or data.

This is the first time in the travel industry that AI capabilities are made available to start-ups and independent developers via open APIs.  Amadeus is providing ready-to-implement predictive models based on valuable insights and functionalities fed by Amadeus’ vast sources of travel data.

These APIs enable travel innovators to create exciting AI-based apps with brand new features and disruptive business models that can transform the travel experience. The insights are offered under Amadeus’ Self-Service API catalogue for partners, and any developer can start testing the APIs in less than three minutes.

Early adopters already demonstrated the value of these AI APIs at Amadeus’ hackathon in London on 9-10 November 2019. The hackathon showcased experimental uses of the APIs which include a ‘buddy’ app to reduce travel stress, and solutions to help travellers find activities to do at their destination and during flight layovers.

“At Amadeus, we constantly look for opportunities to take friction out of travel. That’s why we’re very excited to make these ground-breaking AI-driven insights and tools available to the travel industry for the first time. They will empower innovators to create amazing applications thanks to the power of AI and simplify the traveller’s journey” said Stefan Ropers, president, strategic growth businesses, Amadeus.

 

Our Source: https://www.traveldailymedia.com/travel-tech-this-week-november-28-2019/

 

Turkish airline AtlasGlobal, previously named Atlasjet and launched in 2001 has just suspended all flights. The reason for the suspension is quite vague: they announce on their social media channels that it is entering into a new phase of restructuring in order to provide a “unique flight experience“.

That unique flight experience will not happen for the passengers that booked until 15 December as AtlasGlobal redirects all passenger to its call centre. From 16 December, the airline promises to relaunch all sales channels including website, mobile apps, etc… and plans to relaunch on 21 December.

The airline is mostly flying out of Istanbul airport and has 16 Airbus aircraft in its fleet.

Official statement

Dear Passengers,

As per the decision taken by our airline, we have entered a new phase of restructuring in order to provide you unique flight experience. As of the 26th of November 2019, we have temporarily suspended all our flights.

During this period, all flight irregularities on the tickets until the 15th of December 2019 will be assessed by our teams.
All procedures regarding involuntary change and/or refund will be announced on the 16th of December 2019, on our website. Please contact callcenter@atlasglb.com with your PNR and flight information should you have any further inquiries and questions.

Tickets sales will be suspended until the 16th of December 2019 on all our sales channels including our website, mobile apps, etc.

Our Source:  https://www.aviation24.be/airlines/atlasglobal/turkish-airline-atlasglobal-temporarily-suspends-all-operations/

Kigali — Jambojet has made its inaugural flight to Kigali, becoming the first low-cost carrier to fly the route.

The airline, which recently expanded its fleet with two brand new De Havilland Dash 8 – 400, will be flying once daily from its hub at the Jomo Kenyatta International Airport to Kigali International Airport.

Jambojet Managing Director and Chief Executive Officer, Allan Kilavuka, said the airline is taking advantage of the huge opportunity the African market has to offer.

“We mark a major milestone in our regional expansion strategy. Our aim is to grow our footprint across the continent while offering a unique product for these markets. We expect that our low-cost model will enable more people to fly affordably, conveniently, and safely,” Kilavuka said Monday during the inaugural flight.

The airline is also eyeing South Sudan, Mogadishu, Tanzania, Democratic Republic of Congo, Union of the Comoros and Malawi.

Jambojet currently flies to five local destinations namely Malindi, Ukunda, Mombasa, Kisumu, Eldoret and one regional destination-Entebbe, Uganda – from its hub in Nairobi.

Since inception in 2014, Jambojet, which was, in July 2019, awarded the coveted IATA Operational Safety Audit certification (IOSA), has flown over 3million passengers, 30 percent of whom are first-time flyers.

Our Source: https://allafrica.com/stories/201911260732.html

The revival of Uganda Airlines and Air Tanzania have raised the stakes for the aviation industry in the East African region as the two state-owned flag carriers fight for a slice of the sector currently dominated by international carriers, SADAB KITATTA KAAYA.

As Uganda Airlines launched two additional routes to Mombasa in Kenya and Tanzania’s Kilimanjaro International Airport, Tanzanian authorities were looking at possible partnerships with Uganda to cut out the possibility of unhealthy competition between the two countries’ airlines.

Uganda Airlines resumed commercial flights on August 28, almost three years after the revival of Air Tanzania in September 2016. But since the two airlines are fishing from the same pond for passengers on their regional routes, Atashasta Nditiye, Tanzania’s deputy minister of Works, Transport and Communications, suggests that the two airlines can complement each other with Uganda Airlines feeding Air Tanzania’s long-haul routes.

With two Airbus A220-300 and Boeing 787-8 Dreamliner in its fleet, Air Tanzania operates routes to Mumbai, India and Guangzhou, China, and plans to start flights to Thailand which are popular trade and tourism destinations for East Africans.

“Instead of competition, we can complement each other by Uganda Airlines flying passengers from its various destinations to Air Tanzania’s hub at Julius Nyerere International Airport, Dar-es-Salaam for Air Tanzania to take them to its long-haul destinations,” Nditiye said.

The second area of cooperation is in revamping the East African Civil Aviation Academy also known as Soroti Flying School, proposing that Tanzania’s civil aviation authority works together with Uganda’s civil aviation authority to revamp the flying school.

“We need to work together and empower Soroti flying school so that it builds capacity to train more pilots and other aviation personnel from the region,” Nditiye said.

Soroti Flying School, as is popularly known, was established by the East African Community (EAC) in the early 1970s. But with the collapse of the EAC in 1977, the school was taken over by the Ugandan government that has in recent years been struggling to keep it afloat.

With the revival of the regional bloc in 1999, ownership of the school became a major issue as partner states pushed to have the school’s ownership revert to the EAC. Nditiye’s proposals on the management of the flying school seemingly caused discomfort within the Ugandan delegation. To that effect, Aggrey Bagiire, Uganda’s state minister for Transport, told journalists that the Tanzanian minister spoke without information.

According to Bagiire, there are ongoing efforts by the Ugandan government to solve the issues that have for long dogged the operations of the flying school. For instance, Bagiire said, “President Museveni bought new aircraft” for the school that its fleet now has two twin-engine planes and seven single-engine planes.

Depending on their level, flight instructors earn on average between $4,000 (Shs 14.6 million) and $6,000 (Shs 21.9 million).

Much as its fleet has improved, the school still struggles to get fuel to run the aircraft which might affect the students.

“We need more money for fuel because fuel is key in aviation. When students are training to get licensed, flight time is considered, and if there is no fuel for them to fly the planes, they may not progress,” Bagiire told The Observer.

The flying school’s runway is meanwhile in the process of being improved so that student pilots stop moving to Entebbe to train how to take off and land at night because the school has no runway lights.

Our Source: https://allafrica.com/stories/201911251010.html