“Thank you, was a pleasure and also very beneficial for QF. Keep up the great work, great conference and very beneficial for airlines to share experiences and challenges.”
Gabriella D’Alessandro, Head of IT, Qantas
“It’s been a very good show with lots of good insights. We’ve had a good mixture of existing technologies and fresh new ideas for the future. It has definitely been of benefit to be here.”
Peter Zeitlin, Project Director, Corporate Development, Finnair
“It’s been well worth the time taken to get here. The whole programme has been very interesting and the general debate and the presentations have been of a very high level.”
Jeff Stirk, General Manager Airport Operations & Service Delivery, Sydney Airport Corporation Limited
“Future Travel Experience has been a good opportunity for me to hear the views from many different regions. Personally, I loved the keynote address and the fourth working session with the discussion on NFC and future mobile technologies.”
Hideyuki Isomura, Manager Strategy & Planning, Passenger Systems, Japan Airlines
“I really like coming to this event as it offers a different perspective that you don’t get to hear elsewhere. It’s been interesting to hear from the different carriers and to find out what’s going on in different airports. There has also been a lot of offline discussion in the exhibition hall.”
David Kershaw, Director – Global Airport Solutions, ARINC
“It has been a very interesting conference and the level of presentations has been very high. I now have lot of topics and ideas to take home and think about with my colleagues.”
Victor Vaessen, Manager Product Development, KLM
“It’s the right forum to have so the airlines, airports and vendors can work together and it’s one of the only ways to move forward working as a team to understand the issues that one can encounter. It’s very important because by working together it will make it less costly for the industry and provide a better service for the passenger.”
Louise Lanoix, Manager Customer Service Platform, Air Canada
“It’s been very beneficial to be here because the amount of information we got from the speakers and the information that has been shown to us in the exhibition, if we can implement those things, they will definitely help to enhance the passenger experience.”
Sridhar C.K., Senior Manager – Terminal Operations, Bangalore International Airport Limited
“This show provides a terrific opportunity to share information with suppliers and partners from across the globe. It’s a great opportunity to validate some of the things we’re already doing and to get other little nuggets from the speakers and suppliers. It’s valuable for both the expansion of products and enhancement of the guest experience.”
Dale Tinevez, Vice President – Guest Services, WestJet
“I think it’s great for the industry to come together and just talk about the future. It allows innovation to occur and if there’s one thing that is known it’s that change is inevitable. We have to talk about the future and we have to understand the technologies out there. The keynote we had was fantastic, thinking about the world in 2030.”
Dee Waddell, Group CIO, Amtrak
“Thank you for a great event. The venue was gorgeous and I enjoyed the sessions and think they were packed with good content.”
Jared Miller, Managing Director – Self-Service & Emerging Technology, United Airlines
“I think that FTE 2011 was very good. I thought it was a good idea to try various formats for certain sessions to change the “rhythm” and make it more interesting. I also liked the fact that there was enough time planned for questions, comments and exchanges after presentations; often in conferences, good debates get started and have to be stopped because the session is out of time.”
Antoine Rostworowski, Director Industry Relations, Aéroports de Montreal and Vice Chair, ACI World IT Standing Committee
Conference Curation – an Under-rated Art
A key finding from our Convention 2020 research on the future of business events is the growing importance of the role of the ‘conference curator’ in the design and delivery of the event. I recently witnessed the power of world class curation in action. The Future Travel Experience Conference in Vancouver this September was probably the best designed event I’ve attended in the last decade from a content and learning perspective. Barring the keynotes (of which I was one), the other speakers had 10-20 minute slots to get their message across.
Each speaker was heavily briefed by the conference director (the curator) over a period of several months with precise guidance on the aspects of their work to be shared. The presentations were delivered in related theme clusters – with strong moderation and no break outs. The speakers were largely drawn from airlines and airports and each shared real insights into their strategies and the practical actions they were taking to implement them. An audience of their peers pushed hard in the Q&A sessions, and the level of audience engagement suggested real learning was taking place. The conference is supported by a regular publication and Twitter stream which share content that make very clear the forward looking focus of the conference. As a result, anyone not talking about the future and how they were preparing for it would have looked very out of place.
Many conferences would claim to adopt a similar approach, however what stood out here was the level of preparation and industry insight that had gone in to ensuring an excellent outcome. This was something many delegates commented on when we discussed what made the event such a success. In many respects the conference design went against all the ‘received wisdom’ about how to design and deliver a personalized event experience. However, the quality of the content, learning and delegate interactions suggest that there is still room in the world for well-designed events delivered in a traditional format.
Rohit Talwar, Renowned Futurist and keynote speaker at FTE 2011 – Taken from an edition of his FastFuture newsletter.
