^_INTERVIEW
TOM MAYNARD, VIRGIN ATLANTIC

BTN EUROPE: When we last spoke, a year ago, you said corporate travel recovery was tracking ahead of expectations. What’s your current assessment?
TOM MAYNARD: We finished the year [2022] at 81 per cent recovered [versus 2019] from a revenue perspective within corporate [travel] – that’s contracted corporate and discretionary corporate coming through the TMCs channel. We’ve got a target of 85 per cent recovery this year and we are there or thereabouts so far. What’s been interesting is the slight change in the vertical mix we’ve seen with that. Last year media and technology really led the charge from a recovery perspective. But there’s been a lot of press coverage recently about redundancies [in the tech sector] so we’ve seen an impact on the technology vertical. But what we have seen is a massive uptick in business services and financial services, so the balance is shifting. We've had one year of business post-covid where all bets were off. We weren't really sure what that booking pattern was going to look like for corporate. We're kind of still in that same space this year and just seeing where that volume's going to come in and whether it will follow the traditional seasonality that we'd expect. We're watching that very closely.

BTNE: Give us an overview of Virgin Atlantic for Business which was announced last month. What’s the rationale behind it?
TM: Post-pandemic we've seen the pace of corporate recovery and we wanted to articulate what Virgin Atlantic stands for for the business travel community. It’s an evolution of our business travel proposition for our agency partners and those corporations that we partner with in a contracted manner. But this is also potentially broader than that in terms of how we really set ourselves up for success and broaden our reach in the corporate travel space. The corporate landscape has changed and the way we want to approach it is to personalise interactions with Virgin Atlantic, whether that's from an agent perspective, whether it's from a corporate travel manager perspective, and then ultimately the experience that you get onboard our aircraft. It’s about the journey that you take with Virgin Atlantic from booking through to arrival. It's an evolution of our proposition and it shows that our commitment to business travel is steadfast. We've also doubled the size of our corporate sales team over the course of the last four or five months. So this is really putting a stake in the ground to say we are serious about corporate business.

BTNE: What does this replace?
TM: At the moment we have Partner Hub and that has been a single point of contact for particularly the agent community to go in and have their questions answered. But it's been very kind of flat. There's lots of information in there but you have to search for it.

BTNE: A new web portal which will incorporate self-service functionality is the cornerstone of the new portal. What exactly will it incorporate?
TM: What we're trying to get to with Virgin Atlantic for Business and the web portal that will come is empowering the agency community and the corporate travel community to go in there and self-serve. In its first iteration that will be launched at the end of this year it’s about how we provide the agency community with the ability to go and self-service on waivers and favours. You have your fund you can use for waivers and favours and you won’t need to come through sales support to do that. Similarly, from a corporate travel manager perspective, we talk about 'beyond contract value' – some of the add-ons that we're able to provide. So they won’t need to come to sales support every time they want a gold card issued for so-and-so. We’re going to empower you to do that yourselves and to be able to go in there and get your data, to go in there and track your emissions, your sustainability reports… all those types of things. This is all about empowering our partners. It’s about giving our partners the tools to be able to action things more easily without having to call sales support. This will obviously also free up sales support to deal with the stuff that you do need to be on the phone for.

BTNE: To clarify, this is not about booking?
TM: No, it's not booking. That will still be pushed through the TMC community. But it's those kind of beyond contract value things, those waivers and favours that typically you would have to pick up the phone to sales support to request, that you'll be able to do on your own and take out of the funds that we've allocated to you.

BTNE: How will the portal differ for TMCs, travel managers and agents?
TM: The TMC will have an overarching account… here’s your pool of funds for waivers and favours. The corporate travel manager will have their own login which will take them to their personalised dashboard with the information that they need, that they want to be able to self-serve for. And then the agency community will have their own login, which will take them to stuff that is relevant for them. There’s another part of this too in our being able to tailor our communications because, at the moment, a lot of the communication that comes from Virgin Atlantic is sent out to everybody whether it's relevant to them or not. With this tool we’re able to better tailor our communications. So if you're a corporate travel manager and 99 per cent of your volume is on JV routes across the Atlantic we're probably not going to worry about [notifying you of] a change in schedule to India.

BTNE: What’s the timeline for all this?
TM: The web pages for this sort of Virgin Atlantic sub-brand, if you like, have gone live. They talk about the six pillars that we are focusing on [business traveller experience, rewarding loyalty, technology and service excellence, business as a force for good, global connectivity, and corporate recognition]. They came out of our customer research and go into a little bit more detail about what those pillars actually mean. So the website will provide more clarity around what actually goes into those six pillars. And then the big area obviously is around the technology piece of things, which is coming later this year.

BTNE: Is the portal being piloted with customers?
TM: We reached out to TMCs and corporate partners; we undertook a lot of research around this. We've not put anything into beta testing yet. I think as we move towards the next iteration of the self-service portal, that's when we're going to reach out to a couple of key partners and say ‘can you be our test customer for this?’ and get their feedback and then iron out any of the glitches that you get with these types of systems as you roll them out. Our intention is to do that some sometime during summer ready for a release in the back end of the year.

BTNE: What’s feedback been like following the announcement?
TM: Anything that empowers corporates or our agency partners to go in there and self-serve and be a little bit more self-sufficient… the feedback has been very positive so far. From a corporate perspective, beyond contract value has such importance to a travel manager. It's great articulating what the value is of your corporate contracts and your airline deals but, actually, from an end user experience, it's some of that beyond contract value piece and how we articulate that piece to them so they can show internally what the value is of their relationship with Virgin Atlantic.

BTNE: Who’s eligible for access?
TM: Once we're ready with more of the specifics we'll engage with our TMC partners and our corporate partners to provide logins etc. That will probably come towards the back end of this year. From a corporate perspective, it’s going to be limited to those that we have contracts with because the value proposition is going in there and getting your deal information, your flown information, your beyond contract value, your sustainability reports. So that will be focused very much on where we have that B2B relationship.