How did COVID affect the Travel Practice, and have you recovered from that unreal time yet?
— During COVID, the DataArt Travel practice was the most impacted. Our business went from 20% growth to 40% decline in three weeks. During that time, we talked about team morale and trying to hold together what we had spent years trying to build.
Eugene, our CEO & founder, called me and asked, “What do you want to do? Do we continue with Travel?” As the months evolved, I watched people on the client side who needed to have work getting laid off or furloughed. And where did they go? They went to healthcare, life sciences, and financial services. And I told Eugene, “Our objective is to keep and invest in the relationships that we have, and regardless of the practice, follow the people relationships.” Everyone thought that was a good idea, so I said, “Team, look, we have to figure out how to work on non-travel stuff real fast.”
For example, a tour operator's CIO went to a waste management company, and suddenly, instead of moving people, we're moving toxic waste. These were very environmentally regulated and controlled substances, so it was different from travel, but the team was excited. They had something to work on, and year over year, we were flat instead of way down. That strategy of following the people worked for us.
How did DataArt capitalize when the demand for travel products came back?
— 18 months later, there was all this pent-up demand. But by this time, many competitors had shuttered their travel or aviation practices. You had what is called in the travel industry, the “great retirement.” Many people who were close to retirement took their payouts and did something else. Suddenly, when demand came back, we were one of the few companies with all of our people and domain knowledge. Our colleagues were deployed on different projects, so we had to regroup really quickly.
We were able to capture a lot of demand on the rebound because the team was shrewd enough to ensure we kept up our domain experience. We kept our relationships because that’s ultimately what business is about. So, that ended up being a bet that paid off. Since then, we have been growing year over year.
Just out of curiosity, are you still working with the waste management client?
Waste management was the only one we kept from outside our travel and hospitality domain. We deployed the others to other practices.
How many people do you have altogether in Travel today?
— We’re around 1,200 people, adding 70 to 75 technical experts annually, and even more in consulting and business development.
It sounds like you’re good at making the right bets. You mentioned aviation. How did that become part of the practice?
— I didn’t want to go into airlines, but we started hiring people during the great retirement that came out of airline companies. I called them the “airline conspiracy group.” Six guys got together and asked me, “Why aren’t we targeting airlines?” I said it’s because I don’t know a thing about airlines. They said, “Well, we do.”
So, we put together a plan and acquired a company with aviation expertise called LOLATech. We started attacking the airline sector, which ended up being a good bet. Many companies closed their aviation services departments, which created an opening for us to step in as a new player. It's a very competitive market, but we had enough relationships and were scrappy enough to get in the door.
We’ve worked for some industry giants, like Flight Centre. What do we do for this company?
— Flight Centre is a conglomerate of companies. It has over 30 different brands. It’s traded on the Australian stock exchange, and it’s Australian-owned. However, their biggest market is North America. We build the technology to help them facilitate travel for businesses across the globe.
What other areas of expertise do we have within the travel Practice?
We have a 15-year partnership with GDS Services. Almost half of the airline tickets sold on the planet go through their systems, and we're working on improving them.
We’ve supported some of the world’s best-known travel companies. We help clients build air engines, manage revenue, manage pre-night and post-night hotel stays, and onboard technology. We serve the airline aviation industry. We do commercial operations and maintenance. We have cruises and online travel agencies. We also have the hospitality segment.
How is the practice adapting to the AI revolution?
— Travel as an industry has many operational areas (call centers, mid-office, back-office, loyalty, search, and booking tools) that experts believe will largely benefit and gain efficiency from GenAI.
We have developed a travel-specific RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation) system that extends the capabilities of LLMs to specific domains or an organization's internal knowledge base. We're certified in a particular thing in AWS called UPT (Unified Profiles for Travelers and Guests), and we're the first to be able to offer these niche solutions to people in the travel market.
These initiatives are strategic investments with big future potential, and they're already bringing interesting partners and innovation. Like always, they're getting us in the door!
