Henry Harteveldt, Airline Industry Analyst, and Sam Chamberlain, Chief Product Officer, FLYR, met onstage at Aviation Festival Asia 2025 to explore the airline industry’s ongoing shift toward modern retailing.
They discuss what this transition means for airlines, the complexities involved in integrating new and legacy technologies, and the potential for creating richer, more customer-centric travel experiences. Read or watch below.
Check out our events page to see where we’ll be next, or visit the FLYR for airlines page to learn more about our modern retailing solutions.
Introduction: The Shift to Offer and Order
Henry Harteveldt: Next up, it’s my pleasure to introduce Sam Chamberlain from FLYR to talk to us about what we are calling “Goodbye PSS, Hello Offer and Order,” ushering in a new golden age of travel experiences. So, Sam, when we talk about “Goodbye PSS, Hello Offer and Order,” this has been something we’ve been talking about for a long time. You know, it’s built obviously on NDC and then the retailing standards that IATA have published. FLYR has the advantage of being a greenfield company, and you are working with a greenfield airline, a brand new airline, Riyadh Air, as your first customer. We know that Riyadh Air is getting ready to launch and they will be at a point where they can start selling soon. I’m just curious, as you’re working on the testing and everything, how’s the system working and what are you learning about it?
FLYR and Riyadh Air: Greenfield Implementation
Sam Chamberlain: Yeah, that’s a great question, Henry. Greenfield is probably the best way to think about this and describe it. Everything is new for us. Everything is new for Riyadh Air. But at the same time, as they imagine this sort of new digital future and completely new experiences that they want to offer with their brand promise to their passengers, they also want to make sure that they’re satisfying the needs of passengers today and are backwards compatible with standards and capabilities. So, part of the challenge here is not just building new things and thinking of this as a greenfield, but also how do I build all these new capabilities and enable the airline to be a new digital retailer and next-generation ready? How do we also make sure that they can coexist in this legacy world, or old world, if you like, at the same time? So, we have a lot of fun and a lot of stress and a great time working with Riyadh Air, thinking about how they’re going to be the next generation and also figuring out how they address today’s challenges and solve these problems that are still very real.
A good example of that is an airline still needs to create partnerships and be able to satisfy codeshare and interline capabilities and things like that. And these are capabilities and features that are rooted in very legacy standards and constraints and technology that’s been around for a long time. And we have to make sure that as we build these greenfield capabilities and new things for them, that we’re also solving this problem of “Can I create an itinerary and sell airfare that is connected with a partner and has a codeshare element to it?” So, solving these things at the same time is very interesting, very challenging, but shifting an airline to be able to only operate in this new world is something that’s taking all our attention and that Riyadh Air is getting ready to take advantage of.
Dual Operation Challenges and the Need for Modern Retailing
Henry Harteveldt: We’ve done some marketing research about this and we’ve asked airlines how long they expect to have to operate in a dual world of offer and order and legacy PSS. They expect that they may have to live in this world for nearly a dozen years after they go to offer and order. And, you know, again, not everybody is going to adopt offer and order at the same time. The research we’re doing shows there’s still a lot of ambivalence among airlines about this. There’s a lot of uncertainty, in part because there’s still a lack of clarity on the benefits of what this will offer. So, I’m curious, as you’re talking with airlines, what are the conversations you’re hearing from them? What are the concerns airlines are sharing and how are you managing those concerns? How do you say, “Oh no, no, no, this is going to be much better than you think?”
Sam Chamberlain: There’s two things at the top of my mind that we hear from airlines again and again. They are absolutely desperate to take advantage of this idea of next-generation digital retailing. They want to go away from only being able to sell airfare components. Airlines have already gone away from that by being able to add on things like a hotel booking or a car rental, but in an arguably very clumsy way that’s very, very difficult to do. So, they’re very desperate and eager to be able to sell anything non-air content, to sell it on their terms, to offer new guest experiences to passengers.
But there has been a lot of anxiety around “how do we make sure that we can still operate the way we operate today without breaking anything on that journey?” And a good example of that is the research that suggests that the legacy standards and constraints might be in place for 12 years as you said. I hear sometimes 10 years, sometimes I hear 20 years. The reality is that you’re going to have to operate in both an old world and a new world for a long time still. And the anxiety that comes when I speak to airlines is, “can you really do that? Can you be in this new world and can you be in this old world at the same time?” I gave the example before of codeshare and interline, I’ve still got to be able to do that. I’ve still got to have connectivity to third party systems like accounting and settlement. I’ve still got to be able to service passages and fulfill through the DCS, for example, in the check-in systems.
“You can’t shift your entire operating model and you can’t implement a retailing strategy overnight… What you can do is pick small opportunities and try to capitalize on use cases.”
– Sam Chamberlain, Chief Product Officer, FLYR
And so, the first thing that we’ve done is to build those integrations and solve those integration challenges to be able to prove that we can reduce that anxiety, that we can say that even though it’s a concern because it’s a difficult thing to do, we want to make it very, very clear that it is possible and you can do it. So, you can remove that headache and then demonstrate a path of how you can operate in the current world and start moving to that new world slowly. It’s not a knife edge. It’s not a big bang. It’s something that happens over time and that value comes incrementally as you start exploring new retailing opportunities.
Finding Opportunities for Incremental Adoption
Henry Harteveldt: What I’ve heard from airlines is basically boiling the ocean is too much. And so, I’m like, you know what, instead of boiling the ocean, how about just heating a cup of water? And they’re like, but how? So, I’m just curious, what advice are you offering to airlines as they’re looking at this and perhaps wide-eyed and terrified of what it is? Because the benefits of retailing are compelling, starting with allowing airlines to be much more customer-centric than we’ve historically been able to be.
Sam Chamberlain: I think the advice or the recommendation is you can’t do everything at once. You can’t shift your entire operating model and you can’t implement a retailing strategy overnight that means you’re going to have to completely change how you operate. What you can do is pick small opportunities and try to capitalize on use cases. For example, maybe selling some third-party content. And it might not be ubiquitous across the whole network. It might be just in some markets. You try something new. It might be experimenting with new decision intelligence and decision support technologies. We’re going to make product or bundle recommendations in parts of our network or in trials. It’s very easy with the technology that is now available to us for airlines to go and try things and learn very quickly from them, especially as they leverage AI and ML technology. The data is there. Airlines have all of this data to know what’s available in the market and what they want to sell and what a passenger is likely to do. We can feed those into engines and models and AI agents to make recommendations and learn very quickly. So, it’s not something that they have to fear or worry about, “hey I have to go make this change across my network and if it goes wrong then it’s terrible and everything’s gone wrong.” They can try it in one market. They can try one thing. They can try one third party non-air piece of content to sell or something like that.
Another piece that I think is very important for airlines to understand is that it is possible to start to benefit from new capabilities and these new opportunities without a full and complete displacement of the PSS. It is possible to start to leverage pieces of the offer and order ecosystem that kind of stand side by side with the legacy systems and the PSS to start with. And that serves two benefits. One, they can start to get advantages. So, the example that we use a lot is the advanced shopping cart, a sharable shopping cart, a shopping cart that you can come back to. I think everyone in this industry knows how the cart and the order and the booking creation process works today. You buy everything at once. You decide how many passengers are traveling and once you hit confirm, that’s it. There’s only two things you can do after that, you can cancel or you can split the PNR. That’s it. But what happens if you could add passengers afterwards? What happens if you could decide, you know, I’m going to travel in a different cabin to my children that are coming with me on the same flight? What happens if you want to add new experiences onto that experience afterwards? These are things that could, and we’re already exploring how this can happen without a complete PSS replacement. And the second benefit of that is it de-risks the legacy system displacement. It means in time you can move more and more to a complete offer and order ecosystem that you haven’t had to do overnight. You haven’t had to make that decision straight away.
Beyond “The Flight”: Building Elastic Technology Ecosystems
Henry Harteveldt: The analogy that I like to use is the hotel industry because I’ve also in the past run marketing for a boutique luxury hotel chain and what’s great there is when you make the reservation, that’s the beginning. It’s not the beginning, middle, and end. And so, as an example, after Singapore, I’m going to Laos and the hotel I’m staying at said, would you like to add a transfer? And it was easy to do that. I ticked the appropriate field on the website and got a confirmation back. They build the folio, and that’s what they call it in the hotel world. And I think that offer and order allows airlines to create their version of what a folio would be. You start with maybe the basic reservation, but then you decide you want to add the meal or add the insurance or the lodging or whatever it is that the airline has on offer. As you think about this, as you and your colleagues have been creating FLYR, it seems like it has to be an enormously elastic type of technology solution. Is that fair?
Sam Chamberlain: Yes, absolutely. And that’s a very good way to describe it, and I haven’t heard anybody else describe it as elastic. The other way to look at that or make an analogy is that in today’s world or the legacy world, the PSS and all those systems in place, are built around the construct of a flight. So, a flight is what you can retail. A flight is what you can sell. Now, over time, additional components like ancillaries and seat selection and baggage and Wi-Fi and things like that have been added, but all in the context of a flight. And the key thing with offer and order and building these new capabilities is that there’s no such thing as just a flight. There is a product. There is something that you are going to establish as an offering and it might be a flight or it might be something else. And so, we don’t think about passengers and flights as we’re building the technology and the software. We think about product and product IDs and guests or consumers of these products. And that helps make it elastic. That helps make it more future proof because we build our data models in such a way that means anything that you can come up with as a product offering, third party non-air content, anything can be built and retailed in this ecosystem. You don’t have to build something new. You don’t have to go and reinvent the wheel each time. So, it makes it very, very easy to be scalable and expandable and elastic in the future.
Shifting Focus to Traveler Experiences
Henry Harteveldt: What I think I hear you saying also is this allows airlines to focus on experiences. Airlines, I think, need to create or be able to offer experiences to help distinguish themselves from their competitors. So, it seems like FLYR can help the airline do that. Is that fair?
Sam Chamberlain: Yeah, absolutely. The airlines have been constrained. They’ve been handcuffed for a long time. They’ve watched adjacent industries and maybe even completely different industries kind of evolve into very, very advanced retailers where their operating model, their business model, their ethos and their strategy really shifts into an experience for their customer or their guest. And airlines haven’t been able to do that because the technology has not allowed it and they’ve become impatient, quite rightly so. They’ve now got to the point where they can’t wait any longer.
“Improving the [travel] experience is about making it so there is no anxiety around what happens when things go wrong–and that can be way before and way after your actual flight.”
– Sam Chamberlain, Chief Product Officer, FLYR
And this is a very interesting story with Riyadh Air because what a time to start a new airline and not have to take or be forced to use technology that has got all of these constraints and handcuffs of the past. And that’s what makes this story so interesting. The ability to actually be able to go and do all of these things means they can now shift their focus to “what is my passenger experience going to look like? How am I going to now focus on the customer and offer something completely new?” And I think what’s going to be very, very interesting as we go forward now, when Riyadh Air starts selling and starts flying, is the whole world is going to be looking at them to say, “what kind of experience are you now creating that is nothing like what has happened in the past? What kind of products are you going to sell? What are you going to retail? How are you going to bring back the Golden Age of travel? How are you going to reduce anxiety? How are you going to put everything in the passenger or the guest’s hands that means everything is on their terms?” They can service, they can buy, they can meet on their digital preferred devices and things like that. Everyone’s going to be watching to see what they do to start to see how they can also offer a better experience to their guests.
Henry Harteveldt: As an analyst, it’s certainly something I’m looking forward to seeing as well as a traveler because right now when you think about it, the airline customer experience is limited either to the digital experience, which is just the front end, or what happens on board. And now we’re at a point where this will be much more comprehensive, much more holistic.
Sam Chamberlain: Yeah, and it really starts to pull out that kind of passenger journey way before travel. What is the airport experience? What happens even before the airport experience? What happens on trip? What happens when things go wrong? Improving the experience is about making it so there is no anxiety around what happens when things go wrong and that can be way before and way after your actual flight.
Henry Harteveldt: Sam, thank you very much for sharing all the updates on FLYR. Very, very informative.
Sam Chamberlain: Thanks Henry.
Check out our events page to see where we’ll be next, or visit the FLYR for airlines page to learn more about our modern retailing solutions.
