>> Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE covering AWS re:Invent 2018, brought to you by Amazon Web Services, Intel, and their ecosystem partners. >> And welcome back to Las Vegas. We are live here at AWS re:Invent along with Justin Moore and I'm John Wallis. I know when you travel these days, all you want is, you want it to work, right? >> Yeah. >> We just want to get there. Well, I'll tell you what, Phil Wood from EasyJet wants you to get there as well. As does Matt Leonard from CenturyLink. Gentlemen, glad to have you with us. >> Thanks very much. >> We appreciate it. >> EasyJet, a European-based carrier just north of London, so we're talking about air travel. You are, as we've just recently learned, you are a Catalyst Award winner from CenturyLink, there's a reason for that and that's a point of distinction. So Matt, if you would maybe take us through a little bit about what EasyJet did to earn that distinction. >> Sure, the Catalyst Award is an award that we give out in combination with VMware to kind of highlight customers that are doing new and exciting things with regard to digital transformation. We've been a provider of services and a partner with EasyJet for a long time and they've done some really cool things with regard to services they provide their end customers. And we play a very very small part of that. Two exciting things that are my personal favorites with regard to EasyJet is the Look and Book service. So within the application if you want to book a new trip you normally have to type in the airport that you want to go to, and you have to figure out what's the name of the airport, or the three-digit code. With the EasyJet application you can upload a picture and it has intelligence that's used to figure out that picture and what that landmark is and then what the nearest airport is. So that's pretty exciting. And the second exciting thing within the application >> is a trip in one tap. So you can basically justdial in how much money you want to spend for a trip, hit the Go button, in literally one tap it'll recommend a city, a hotel, and a fun and exciting thing that's happening during that duration of time. So for last minute travelers, my family's certainly one of those, we got a free period of time, one tap it'll tell you where to stay, how to get there with EasyJet and then what's exciting happening within that city. >> So I could put in, I say, I want to spend 300 dollars a ticket, and tap boom, and it'll say you can go to Brussels, you can go to Amsterdam but you can't make it to Dublin this weekend, right? Or whatever. I love that. So what has that done for your business in terms of, on a micro level and a macro level, what's it doing in terms of that interface and what's it mean to your business in general? >> As a business, we're 23 years old, so we started very much like a startup and we kind of came in at low-cost airline bracket. But now what we're renowned for is the convenience, and you've got two examples there where our customers love that because it's a convenient way. They don't have to do lots of searching, they can just take the photograph and they know exactly where they're going to go. And that's really what differentiates us is that convenience and the customer experience that we offer to all of our customers. We have a lot of customers. We have 90 million passengers a year. They come to us because they know not just that we give great value but that experience. So what it's done, it's made us grow. And that's literally how we continue to grow is to expand those customer services and Centurylink have been a part of that journey for over half of our tenure as an airline. >> It sounds like technology is actually right on the edge of driving that value for customers and making things easy. Like just the experience of being able to walk out and take a photo of something and say, I want to go here. I would like to go out and see if I can trick it by taking a photo of the Eiffel Tower out in the back here. >> We'll go and try it out in a bit. >> I'm confident. >> We'll see how it goes. That's making use of a whole bunch of technologies. It's got mobile technology in there, it's got image recognition, it's got machine learning. What else are you seeing at the show here at AWS, what are some of the technologies that you think will drive the next evolution of things, what's going to win you the next award? >> I think one of the things I've really been looking at is around data and around the personalization. So we talked about customer experience but our whole journey of taking a plane, taking a holiday, for example, it's from the moment you book it to the moment you get back. There's so many touch points during that and there's so much data that we can take from that. So I've been really interested in looking at how different organizations and how Amazon have been using data. I also think you can't come to a show like this without looking at machine learning and AI. We're using aspects of that in how we analyze our data, but that's certainly something I think's going to change the airline industry moving forward. >> How important is a partnership with someone like CenturyLink in making sure that you get the best use of these technologies? >> Matt talked about that they have a small part to play but you've got to understand that every single customer, every single search on our website goes through a network. In order for us to connect to our customers, be they booking a flight, be they on a flight, we've got to go through a reliable network. And the way I describe it, it needs to be effortless. It needs to just work. You mentioned that right at the beginning. But I also think as well for us to exploit technologies like the cloud, which is what we're starting to invest a lot more into, we need a partner who can help us on that journey. So again, that's where CenturyLink and the partnership we've got has been absolutely crucial. The things that we're doing with CenturyLink around making sure that we're only paying for our network for what we use. We're an airline. Our airports are seasonal so kind of traditional networks, what you'll end up doing is paying for bandwidth all year, when in the winter seasons if you're not flying there that's dead money. So it's simple things like that but that makes a huge difference towards my cost base perspective. >> And time of day, I assume that affects that as well? >> Absolutely. I mean, clearly in our summer periods we fly a lot, so time of day during the summer, there's not that many hours we don't fly. >> You get a lot of daylight over there, right? (laughter) >> But certainly in winter where we have our kind of summer destinations, it makes a big big difference. And that's cost we pass on to the customer as well which is massively important. >> What is it about the customer that you don't know? You talked about AI, what that could do for you down the road. How much information, how much data do you think you can extract from the customer to make that experience even better, and what do you need to know about them, and how will CenturyLink help you get there? >> You need to know everything. I mean, we know that we sell a hundred seventy million bacon sandwiches a year. Whether that's useful or not, but we know that. >> There's hungry people. >> That's a lot of bacon. >> It is a lot. But it means that we know the type of food that our customers want to eat, we know the top destinations, even knowing how long between booking a flight and actually flying. So we know from a price perspective and from a making sure our planes are full or making sure we're not overselling our flights. All of that information, there's just a wealth of data that you're getting out there. And it's not just customers. One of the big factors for us is safety. So we use our data now to analyze maintenance. So we have predicted maintenance around when's the right time to put in spare parts but also what's the most efficient time so that we're not disrupting the customer. So actually we may want to bring a maintenance cycle sooner so we can open up more routes for customers to fly when they want to. So it's very hard to answer that question cause every day we're coming up with new ideas or new bits of information that at the time we never thought we needed to know but that actually turns out to be an absolutely crucial part of our offer. >> That's not an unusual thing for most people in a world where there's this much dynamic, this much change going on. So what process do you run through to figure out, where should we be looking to find out the next set of optimizations? Or how do you discover what is the next thing that you should work on, like where does the idea for, maybe we should build this app. Where does that come from? >> I don't think there's one model. I think what's always been at the heart of EasyJet is innovation, and we've always focused on the customer. So we have a great loyalty scheme and our customers are very loyal. We have 75% loyalty with our customers which is phenomenal. We get a lot of feedback and that feedback drives a lot of the ideas that we push forward. So I think it's a mixture of our passion, it's a mixture of our experience, but I'd say that feedback from the customer, that drives a lot of the ideas that we do moving forward. >> From the CenturyLink perspective, you received certification for the MSP designation. >> Yup. >> Working in the travel business, what does that do, or how does that MSP certification translate over to learning about a different industry, to applying different approaches, unique approaches, because it's not one size fits all. They have very, very specific challenges that you're trying to address. >> Yeah, so on a broader sense, our mission with clients like EasyJet and customers interested in the cloud is really to connect, migrate, and then manage their workloads within the cloud. That's really what we're focused on. And there's certainly commonalities within verticals but every customer's different, and really assessing, starting with the customer, and that's a common thing that I think both EasyJet as well as CenturyLink and certainly Amazon have in common, really focused on that customer journey. One of the approaches that we take through a program called CustomerLink is put the customer right in the center of the team and we've applied the Agile methodology to that customer engagement process. So we do a standup meeting once every two weeks, we do sprints once every two weeks. A lot of our customers are part of that board that we use to activate the sprint and to define priorities and what actions are. So really pulling the whole team together across different departments, focusing on the customer first, and in many cases the customer's customer first cause a lot of your priorities are based on what your customers are after, and really making sure that we're working on the right activity in a very lean way, pulling away as much waste as possible that aren't contributing to adding value to the customer journey. >> And then from your side of the fence going forward, you've mentioned four or five general areas, you've said, we could improve here, we could look at this, we could look at that. How do you prioritize and say, okay, let's focus here now and then we'll move on. So if you had to focus now, or for the next twelve months, what would that be on? >> So we've actually just relaunched our strategy. At the heart we are an airline so our priority is about being number one or number two in all the primary airports. We've got to keep that. But we also recognize from the data that the amount of our customers who will book hotels or book further products through some of our partners that's something that we can actually capitalize on. So we're looking more into holidays now. Taking that customer centricity, and how do we make the end-to-end journey for our customers so including travel to and from airport and the whole day. So that's a priority for us. Continue building our customer loyalty. So as much as we pride ourselves on loyalty, we believe there's a lot more you can do. I think the airline loyalty schemes need to be shaken up a little bit more. If you look in the retail sector or things like that they're focusing on different things. It's no longer just the case of air miles. People want speedier boarding, or they want a better experience, better seating arrangements. So we're looking at our loyalty. And then also business. We talk about, we've got really good slots for when we fly planes. And they're slots that are competitive to a business traveler. So that's our three main areas, I would say, are business, holidays, and loyalty. >> Matt, you're going to be in business for a while. I think you're okay. If you could work on legroom, I'm sold. Matt and Phil, thank you for being with us. We appreciate the time. Join us here on theCUBE. You're watching our live coverage from Las Vegas at AWS re:Invent. (electronic music)