I’m writing this on Friday afternoon as the CAPA Airline Leader Summit in Cairns draws to a close.
Thanks to astronomically expensive flights in and out of Cairns around the conference, I’m not heading out until 7pm on a Virgin Australia flight that lands in Sydney just after 10pm – weather permitting, of course, as I understand that there is a 50/50 chance parts of Sydney might have been washed away by the time I get back.
There was a slight irony in the situation – speaking to a few delegates at the event, they too had been hamstrung by flight costs. But Cairns Airport CEO Richard Barker is keen to set the city up as a potential gateway to Australia.
He was, of course, hoping that aircraft like the A321 XLR which is now in the hands of Qantas (well, one anyway) would provide that opportunity, with regional airports like Cairns being the major beneficiaries of point-to-point flights. In the past, those routes wouldn’t have presented a business model as the distance was too long, so the only planes that could do it were widebodies which didn’t make sense with the route economics.
Narrow body long range could present a decent opportunity.
More flights, lower prices. Lower price, more demand. Then the destination marketers can work their magic. We all know how it works.
Based on this week’s flights’ prices, it’s a change that is well needed for Cairns. Airports in Australia’s north, more generally, seem to be at the mercy of horrendously high airfares right now.
I spoke to more than one person at the MTA National Conference in Adelaide last week about the cost of an airfare to Darwin at the moment. Good luck to Tourism NT trying to boost visitation with that large hurdle.
Interestingly, though, when it comes to astronomical flight prices, there was another factor that I learnt about during the CAPA conference.
It was a ‘blink and you missed it’ moment, as Philippine Airlines VP of Sales, Justin Warby briefly spoke about ‘seat spinning’ at the start of a panel called ‘Technology in focus: How AI is shifting the technology and distribution landscape for aviation and travel’.
According to Warby, for the uninitiated (which seemed to be quite a number of delegates at the conference), seat spinning is essentially when a “nefarious operator” will use technology (bots) to target near full flights, place a hold on the seats left available, and try to sell them at a significantly inflated price via another reseller.
“They will then use your own ticketing time limits or your own payment methods such as ‘book and hold’ when it is close to departure, and they will actually come and hold that inventory,” he revealed.
“Then they will sell that content to third party providers to resell, and that resell could be at prices double or three times the price.”
Warby is furious about the situation, suggesting that it has “a huge revenue impact because we’re not selling the seat as it is being held”.
He said it is also creating a “reputational issue” as the consumer believes it is the airline itself that is way too expensive.
Unfortunately, Warby said COVID not only brought the travel industry to its knees, but it also gave these kinds of operators the time to think up plans on how they could game different systems.
“People were sitting around during the pandemic thinking up bigger plans about what they could do to extract value out of distribution in this space!” he exclaimed.
And it all stemmed from an insatiable appetite for content.
“We have a number of content redistributors, and particularly, they redistribute their content to OTAs, and I’m not saying there is anything wrong with that, but it is where they get their content from which is the problem,” Warby explained.
“A lot of these redistributors of content get their content by scraping content from airline.com [an airline’s website] so in this case from our own website, so we spend a lot of time inhibiting, trying to limit these actors who come and sometimes do nefarious things on our website.”
The end result with seat spinning is that the airline doesn’t hold the inventory anymore, they’ve been used by the third party and the ticket has been sold by another party. If it doesn’t sell, the seat gets released, or the time limit ends, they just buy it again by placing the same hold on it straight away.
Perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised that aviation is suffering here. In fact, it could be going a lot further.
According to the 2025 Imperva Bad Bot Report, the travel industry is the most targeted sector by bad bots thanks to its high-value inventory, soft targets and huge amounts of data.
As you would expect, the shields have gone up in some quarters and the counter-attack is on.
According to Warby, Philippine Airlines won’t take this one lying down.
“There is one tool we launched recently that looks at the computing power of the session that is coming into the website and based on the computing power, we will then interrupt or pause that session which then gets the bot to create another session, so we then overwhelm the computing power of the bot.”
Essentially, they are breaking the system that is trying to break in.
He said that the airline is constantly looking into new defensive tools to counter the bots.
After the recent cyber-attack on Qantas, it is good to see others in the industry get on the front foot.
The rest of the week with ADAM BISHOP
In further news, Damo recently attended the MTA Mobile Travel Agents (MTA) national conference, filing plenty of interesting updates about the agency network’s performance.
Among the many interesting takeaways, founders Roy and Karen Merricks and CEO Don Beattie told TD that on average, total transaction value (TTV) is now sitting at just under $1 million per travel advisor.
In a great sign for MTA, that number has ballooned from just $611,000 per member before the pandemic.
MTA also announced its first chatbot to delegates, which aims to significantly reduce the time it takes to fill out a passenger name record from 10 minutes to just 16 seconds.
While the results are impressive, Beattie was quick to qualify that AI will never replace the power of human interaction within his organisation.
To the resurrection of an historic travel brand, and this week we learned that the defunct Aussie carrier Ansett has returned.
In a way.
The Ansett Travel Platform was launched by Melbourne tech entrepreneur Constantine Frantzekos, who described the platform as “the Costco of travel”.
Frantzekos claimed the new Ansett platform is the country’s first “truly AI-run travel agency” and will offer discounted hotels, flights and holiday packages.
More big news came the way of Goldman Travel Group this week, which announced the partial acquisition of well-known Queensland-based luxury agency Main Beach Travel (MBT).
While the initial purchase is for a 50% stake, Goldman will gradually increase its equity every year until it assumes full ownership after three years.
Speaking with TD about the news, MBT owner Mike Dwyer said it was not easy to let go of his cherished business, but the timing was right and he believes Goldman Travel Group is the ideal partner to grow the business moving forward.
To aviation and it was Air New Zealand that was all gears up about its executive ranks, confirming its new CEO will be its current Chief Digital Officer Nikhil Ravishankar.
The Kiwi carrier has been bullish about leading digital innovation in aviation, while at times it must be said, holding its cards pretty close to the chest about what they will be.
Ravishankar is tipped to bring some model-changing ideas to Air NZ, which has been battling a raft of headwinds, including supply chain issues and engine problems.
And finally, Flight Centre Travel Group shares were sent tumbling after the business revised down its underlying net profit guidance to between $285-$295 million. While market volatilities have shaken the company’s books for now, there were some fascinating updates contained in the latest update.
This was namely a new loyalty program, which FCTG confirmed will go live late in H1 next year.
FCTG was unable to put too much flesh on the bone of what the loyalty model will look like, so watch this space!
