How Kyte connects airlines with the travel ecosystem

Seth Anagnostis: Hey everyone. Welcome to the Travel as a Human Emotion Podcast. I’m Seth Anagnostis, Senior Director of Content and Distribution at Spotnana. Joining me today is Alice Ferrari, CEO of Kyte. Kyte helps connect travel sellers with a wide array of airline content via its robust set of APIs. Alice, thanks so much for joining us. Can you please introduce yourself and start by telling us for a couple minutes about why Kyte was created and what you’re building?

Alice Ferrari: Sure, and thank you so much for having me today. Hello everyone, I’m Alice Ferrari, CEO and Co-founder of Kyte. I started this business almost six years ago, actually out of an absolute passion for the airline industry. My background is in aviation. I started my career at EasyJet. I did a master’s in airline management from Cranfield University, which sort of is proof of how much I love this industry. I basically specialized in airline management and spent four years at EasyJet, where I was lucky enough to be offered a development role reporting to the ops leadership team and helping the senior management and operations bring together some digital initiatives. And that’s what led me to really develop this interest towards tech in the airline industry.

Fast forward, I then got a job at Founders Factory, which is basically a venture studio based in London that took investments from a number of corporate organizations and would then go out and invest in companies and create startups from scratch that were strategic to these corporates, basically exposing large organizations that maybe found it more challenging to innovate, to work with startups. EasyJet was one of the strategic investors of Founders Factory. So for basically two years, I was looking after the travel tech sector of Founders Factory, essentially operating on behalf of EasyJet and going to find startups that were a good investment for EasyJet and also creating concepts that would help EasyJet bring more innovation into their ecosystem.

And it was back then—this was 2018, 2019—that we were looking at NDC starting to become a bit more mainstream, a bit more adopted; a solution that could really replace the traditional EDIFACT channel. And because of the collaboration with EasyJet, we were looking at something that could really cater to the low-cost carrier (LCC) world as well. So that’s when we came up with this concept, and then I was basically offered the opportunity to go and develop Kyte as a company of my own. This was just before the pandemic. We’ve been through a lot, but I’m really proud to say that today we are in really good shape. We’re working with 12 airlines that are live today on our platform and have a number of great partners that we’re distributing their content to. So that’s sort of me in a nutshell.

Seth Anagnostis: Amazing. I love every startup’s founding story. And yours is a great winding road in terms of your own personal interests, your own career. And then I was going to say being in the right place at the right time, but founding a startup about a year before the pandemic hit, you might phrase that differently. Although, I’m sure that created some new opportunities for you to learn as a founder that you might not have had otherwise.

Alice Ferrari: Oh, indeed. We learned to operate in an extremely lean way, which reassures investors. But yes, we’ve had a few sets of challenges, that’s for sure. But I think the pandemic has really accelerated the adoption for either NDC or API distribution. So, in hindsight, it has actually promoted a solution like Kyte.

Seth Anagnostis: Yeah, you end up with experiences you might not have had if it had not been for having to fight through that. And I do remember Alice and I first met—I think it was probably very shortly after you joined Kyte but definitely before the pandemic. And now we’re very lucky to have the opportunity to work together in my role at Spotnana and with Alice overseeing Kyte’s growth.

The way that we work together today is that Spotnana has a connection with Kyte to bring low-cost carrier content to Spotnana’s users. Particularly Ryanair, I would say, is our signature connection that we end up talking the most about. EasyJet we get a lot of volume through as well. And those come through APIs that are easy to digest, and they provide great functionality for those particular airlines. This is especially interesting because those airlines very famously have more of a direct website strategy. They’ve been somewhat more challenging if you are in the corporate space or outside of their direct website to figure out how you can ensure that you are booking those airlines, but also in a corporate environment, which Spotnana is focused on today, to be able to actually have the full end-to-end experience that the corporate traveler is looking for.

So I wanted to start out: let’s talk for a few minutes in terms of Kyte’s model and your market in particular. One thing that’s interesting when you describe Kyte and what you do, even though you are working with APIs and making sure that those APIs get into a channel that is selling flights and other travel like Spotnana, you do not typically or at least not always describe Kyte as an aggregator. And I think part of that is because you are actually managing that external API for your partners; can you talk through that? What is the strategic advantage of that, and why has that model in particular really resonated with some low-cost carriers that really are focused mostly on the direct channel like Ryanair and EasyJet?

Alice Ferrari: Yeah, that’s a great question, and one that we often find ourselves discussing because I think the best way for us to describe Kyte is that we’re a platform connecting airlines with the travel ecosystem. First of all, I say travel ecosystem and not travel partners because we envisage a world where airlines become extremely interoperable and can connect to many partners in the industry. Not just travel agencies, but think of a company like DoHop that enables virtual interlining. They still have to connect to airlines via API. Or a company like Caravelo who does subscription travel for airlines. They have to connect to airlines via API. And so having this sort of unified solution that allows airlines to just connect to various different applications or platforms just makes the industry much more prone to collaboration.

We try to differentiate ourselves from the sort of traditional aggregator simply because, whilst there are some great aggregators out there—and we work with a number of them, including TP Connects, including Air Gateway—generally the aggregator perception has always been to put together a mishmash of content. It may not be directly taken from the airlines. There may be other modes of transport included, whereas we’re extremely focused just on airlines and only connecting to airline APIs directly.

We see Kyte as a direct connect enabler. So a travel company or a travel partner would come to Kyte even to connect to a single airline, but use our API in lieu of a traditional NDC or a proprietary API because the way we’ve built it is designed to make that connection much faster, much more efficient. So obviously, once you’ve connected, then you can access multiple airlines that are on our platform. So there is that work of unification, but as I said, it’s designed to be a great way to connect directly with the airline.

It’s resonated particularly with low-cost airlines because, first of all, there was a gap in the market for low-cost connectivity. GDSs are not really entirely aligned with the low-cost distribution model. There’s less money to be made in low-cost distribution, so the content of low-cost carriers is often overlooked when it comes to accessing content through the GDSs. And whilst there are a couple of direct competitors of Kyte, at least in our side of the world, there isn’t a sort of unified API that’s entirely focused on low-cost.

We prioritize quality versus quantity. So we have fewer airlines than our peer aggregators, but the ones that we do are entirely end-to-end. Low-cost carriers obviously rely a lot on their ancillaries, on their bundles, on their functionalities, which they sell as an add-on. And so offering that end-to-end product and functionality makes a low-cost airline reassured that their content is being properly replicated on a travel partner’s website or tool.

Seth Anagnostis: Yeah. So they’re looking for different things out of working with you than perhaps a mainline carrier with an NDC API might be looking for when they’re getting it into the corporate space.

Alice Ferrari: Yeah, I think so. Corporate travel companies—all travel companies really, but particularly in the TMC world—we see that they really value the depth of the content. And so focusing on all the bundles, all the ancillaries, all the functionalities has really attracted these quality players that come to us for this, and Spotnana being, of course, one of them. I think what Spotnana is doing is great, in the sense that there’s a lot of transparency that we see from your UI. It really makes the traveler feel like they’re not missing out by not booking on the airline’s website. Whereas some corporate tools, we find when you’re booking through them, you feel, “Am I missing out on some options? Is everything here? Is it complete?”. Whereas I see with Spotnana that the experience is very much like-for-like with the airline’s website, at least from our content, what we see.

Seth Anagnostis: Yeah, and that goes both ways. I think a big reason why we wanted to work with Kyte as a partner is because you enable us to have to offer that experience. We philosophically across the board at Spotnana, whenever we hear anybody say, “I found it better, I found it cheaper somewhere else,” that to us says, “Okay, that’s something that we need to go and address”. Because particularly in the corporate travel market, you never want to have a situation where somebody says, “Hey, wait a minute, I know this space, I’m an expert. I can get that cheaper on the website or I can get that better on the website”. And so when we have conversations in our partnership, I love that we’re always focused on, “Hey, wait a minute, help me understand not just why, not just that you are offering a new airline, but explain to me actually how it differs”. And it in many cases ends up being better than what’s available on the website. So that way, as our teams are out there talking with customers who themselves, in addition to their customers, are used to using the airline website, we can speak to them about exactly what experience they’ll have with us.

Alice Ferrari: A hundred percent. And actually corporate travelers, I find they just love calling either their TMC partner or their corporate booking tool partner saying, “I found something better on the website,” or, “Why can’t I book this special fare?”. And it’s really important to have that equivalent, if not better.

Seth Anagnostis: Yeah. So when you are working with airlines with this model, Alice, and they’re deciding what content they want to keep exclusive to their website versus what they do want to expose through the Kyte API, how is that conversation? Is there an internal debate? Are you convincing them that they should make more available? Do they already know what they want when they come to work with you? What is—and I’m sure no conversation is exactly the same—but what would you say generally the dynamic is, and how do you approach those conversations today as you bring on new carriers?

Alice Ferrari: Yeah, another great question. And I think there’s just this theme that is evolving. Of course, I’m offering you the low-cost perspective because that’s our biggest area of focus. But low-cost carriers tend to protect their lowest fares for their website because obviously the cost of sale on direct channels is a lot lower. So ideally they would want to sell everything through their own website or mobile app. So we do see some content differentiation that comes up on the API versus the website.

However, I think that is changing. And the delta between the API and the website is narrowing because of a number of factors. First of all, low-cost carriers were traditionally staying away from third-party distribution. And now because low-cost airlines are growing significantly—of course, they’ve been around for a lot less time than traditional flag carriers—low-cost carriers have been around for say, 20 years. Now they’ve grown exponentially faster than traditional airlines. Now they’re looking at other geographies, they’re looking at other market segments, for example, corporate travel, and thinking how do we capture this type of market? So they’re opening up to third-party distribution.

Seth Anagnostis: Yeah, no, that’s good. Let me ask you a follow-up based on that. What does it mean to you and to your business if a low-cost carrier decides that they want to adopt NDC? Does that impact the way that you work with them? Does that make things easier or harder, or are you indifferent based on what your model is in the market?

Alice Ferrari: Ah, this is a tricky question. So for me, every API is different, whether it’s an NDC API, whether it’s low-cost NDC, whether it’s proprietary, or whether it’s an Navitaire API. They’re all different. So no matter how much standardization airlines go after with NDC, it’s always a different integration. And to be honest, I understand why airlines are looking for this sort of standardization Nirvana where they can all collectively play, especially for the GDS NDC world. I can see that’s why low-cost carriers are also adopting NDC. I don’t think it’s a great move for low-cost airlines because it’s a very expensive solution.

And what we’ve seen is over the years, full-service airlines have really been looking at what low-cost carriers are doing. They have been the pioneers of innovation, copying their business models, copying how they started unbundling all the products and services that traditionally were included with a ticket. And now what we’re seeing is low-cost airlines looking at full-service airlines, thinking, “It feels a bit like a regression” when low-cost airlines look at what full-service carriers are doing. So I’m not a big fan of low-cost airlines adopting NDC. I do see why they are adopting it, but NDC should be a concept and not a standard because the industry needs to keep evolving. APIs need to keep evolving. APIs may not even be around in a few years. We’re already seeing AI take over this space.

Seth Anagnostis: Okay. Whoa.

Alice Ferrari: Yeah, I’m getting overexcited here, but yeah. I think NDC should be just a loosely interpreted concept, and airlines should be able to adopt whatever they see fit to connect with their ecosystem.

Seth Anagnostis: That’s probably for another podcast, but that’s interesting, in terms of as NDC evolves and as it becomes more standard, it also becomes more robust. So does that potentially give the opportunity for a low-cost carrier to play in that space, knowing that there’s a bit more that they will be able to do than they might have been able to do many versions of NDC ago, if they had adopted it when it was probably a bit more narrow and not so robust? But I guess the good thing is you don’t have to have a take on that. You just need to figure out who you want to work with based on what fits the way that your business is evolving. And while it sounds like monitoring whether the robots will take over APIs in the first place. But this will be a rare podcast in which we’re not going to cover AI today. So.

Alice Ferrari: We’ll do that for another time as well.

Seth Anagnostis: One other quick follow-up on this topic, Alice, as you and the Kyte team onboard new airlines, how long does that typically take these days, knowing that there’s probably quite a variety depending on what you just described in terms of all APIs are created differently? How does that work, and how does your team think about it?

Alice Ferrari: Yeah, so again, I think this is something that no tech partner has really cracked as an issue yet. As mentioned, there is really no standard API, no matter who’s built it and how they’ve built it. So it takes between four to six months to integrate with an airline API for us. And that’s for a low-cost carrier; it could take up to eight to ten months for a full-service airline. That’s it. It does make it quite challenging to connect, and that’s the bottleneck. We do move quite fast, but we’d love to move even faster in order to have more airlines.

But that’s basically why we exist and why we do that work on behalf of the travel companies so that they only have to connect to our API, which traditionally takes about four to six weeks. So about 50% or less time. And obviously, it’s supposed to be only once to access all of our airlines. We’ve seen some travel tech companies integrate our API in two weeks, but the norm is around four to six.

Yeah, it is still a challenge to find the resources to connect to airlines. We’re trying to perfect that. We’ve adopted two solutions. One of them is AI-based, so we’re looking to replicate some of the work that we’ve already done so that we can use some of that code. And the other is a proprietary system that we’ve built internally in order to accelerate that development. But it’s still, of course, work in progress. It’s something that if we crack, we will be a winner in this industry for sure.

Seth Anagnostis: Yeah, that’s because I think that’s pretty revealing because from our perspective, when we plug into Kyte, we see that as pretty easy integration. You all make it quite easy for us to plug in and get access to that content quite quickly and seamlessly. But of course, what happens behind the scenes is your team putting in four to six months. And that’s for a company of tech experts that are domain experts that know how the APIs work. And that’s still how long it takes. So I think that’s pretty revealing in terms of what has to go on behind the scenes in order for you to make that business experience really seamless for your partners.

Alice Ferrari: Yeah, and that’s exactly what we do. It’s our bread and butter. That’s what we’ve been doing for the past six years. The industry, I think, sometimes is surprised. I remember a few years ago we were working with a tech company who couldn’t believe that it took us that long. They were claiming that it took them a couple of weeks to integrate, but then when you actually looked under the hood, they hadn’t done the ancillaries. They didn’t support post-ticketing, and that’s really important. You can’t really offer a quality solution without integrating all the functionalities, and that’s why it takes us quite a while, but we believe that quality will pay off eventually.

Seth Anagnostis: Yeah. And that will potentially depend on where you’re going in the market. I know for Spotnana, that would be a non-starter if you said, “Hey, we don’t offer this end-to-end functionality”. And then that means that the agents of our partner TMCs are having to constantly go outside of our system in order to service that. We know that experience doesn’t work. And the leisure market potentially can get away with it a little bit more. But I think as time goes on, patience for that probably wanes as well.

So that gets me to my next topic I wanted to cover around this, which is the fact that Kyte is a two-sided marketplace. You’re connecting to airlines, but then enabling those APIs to be sold via your partners. So I’m interested to know if there are constant dynamics in terms of, first of all, where do you need to invest based on the content that you’re offering and where you want it to go in order to be a good partner to those airlines? But then also obviously needing to ensure that you have a robust enough number of airlines that partners want to plug into you. And the constant trade-offs of running a startup.

Where is your business development energy focused today? Is it on new airlines? Is it on continuing to invest in capabilities with your existing partners? Or is it on adding new channels to your distribution network? Knowing that answer might change on a week-to-week basis as opportunities come in, but where would you say is the majority of your focus at this point?

Alice Ferrari: We focus on everything. No, I’m joking. It’s a great question. And you actually touch on the sort of the sore spot of a marketplace, because that’s the traditional conundrum, right? The chicken and egg, which, what do you focus on first? Luckily now we’ve reached a good critical mass of airlines, which means that the platform in itself is just for the content that we have, it allows us to go out to market and make it an appealing solution for travel companies.

So we are mainly focusing on the demand side, so the travel partners. I think, as I said, there’s a real drive for quality lately. So even if we have 12 airlines today that are live, the fact that we have an end-to-end solution makes it a valuable solution that many travel companies will switch to us for those particular airlines. And obviously, having a nice network of a base of travel companies who are connected to our API does make it a good selling point for new airlines. We do the heavy lifting. We connect to the airlines’ API, and once they’re onboard, they immediately have access to a pool of thousands of agencies that they can sell to from day one.

It’s great that we can also grow from within, just by adding a new airline. Then obviously there’s just naturally more bookings to be made by our existing travel companies for that new airline. So the marketplace presents some real challenges when it comes to chicken and eggs, but it’s also great because just by adding a new airline without any new travel agencies, you automatically get more bookings just out of that single airline. So it’s quite fun to watch.

Seth Anagnostis: Yeah. The dynamics there are always fun. I know when we met, I was with RouteHappy at the time before ATPCO had acquired RouteHappy, or maybe right around the time of the acquisition. And one thing that we talked about at that time was basically that exact dynamic in terms of how do you get new airlines on the platform, but then also ensure that the channels are working.

And one thing that I think Kyte is doing really great, which worked well for RouteHappy at the time, was you’ve somewhat, in the LCC realm, you’ve somewhat started at what I would say is the top of the market if nothing other than quantitatively in terms of the pure number of bookings that come through—Ryanair and EasyJet in particular. So you make it easy for a partner like Spotnana to say, “Hey, of course I need to get, even if I’m not focused, generally speaking, on the LCC space, I know I definitely need these couple of airlines because they’re among the top dozen or two largest airlines in the world”. And then as you continue to add new airlines from there, and we’ve seen how the relationship works with some of the larger and more complex in the LCC space, then it becomes easier for us to say, “Okay, we’re already plugged in, so what else can we do together at this point?” So I think you’re playing that dynamic very well.

Alice Ferrari: Thank you. And yes, that’s exactly the idea of Kyte. What’s been interesting is that a lot of players—new travel companies or new travel tech platforms like yourselves—really focus on NDC, whereas they don’t really want to deploy the same amount of resources on low-cost just because most of their demand goes on full-service. And so by offering a connection into the low-cost market, we can fill that gap. And that’s what’s allowed us to work with some of our competitors that actually focus on mainly NDC. We’ve turned our competitors into customers and they come to us just for low-cost content. Again, TP Connects is a great example for that. Air Gateway is a great example for that, and I’m sure they don’t mind me saying this. So the low-cost focus has really been a game changer for Kyte because of that sort of gap that we’re filling in this space.

Seth Anagnostis: Yeah, and that’s an important gap. From the traveler’s perspective, we always said a traveler should not—never will and should not—care about whether something is NDC, whether it’s a low-cost carrier. They just want to have the best experience possible in that carrier, knowing that every carrier will make different things available, that they’ll have different products for sale, but you want to just be able to offer the best. So I think that probably speaks to the quality of your offering that those who might have previously been termed as competitors say, “Hey, if we want to have a robust offering, we need to grab onto this because that’s the best way to get access to that content”.

Alice Ferrari: A hundred percent. And if you look at the numbers, it’s quite clear that low-cost demand is growing even in corporate travel for a number of reasons, including just the pure coverage. Low-cost airlines are… if you look at Ryanair, they’re the largest airline in Europe. EasyJet connects some great sort of primary airports around Europe. They’re just… there is a real need for low-cost content to fill certain gaps in the network that full-service airlines may not be able to cover.

Seth Anagnostis: So in terms of low-cost content, Spotnana is consuming these low-cost airlines from Kyte. What would you say in terms of our work together, what are we doing particularly well in terms of adopting your APIs, and where would you suggest that we take things from here in our own partnership?

Alice Ferrari: Of course, we are committed to delivering a great working relationship and we want to strengthen that by hopefully driving adoption for more airlines. We hope to support more meaningful airlines such as Ryanair, easyJet, and the rest of the low-cost airlines that are… we’ve got two new low-cost airlines that we’re about to announce. By the time this podcast is issued, we will probably have announced them by then. But the idea is to bring more meaningful airlines for Spotnana to adopt and for you to be able to access them by virtually doing a simple switch.

I think what I love about Spotnana is you’re driven by perfection. There has been rigorous testing before you put our content live to your customers. And as I was saying earlier, I think the greatest part about Spotnana is the UI, the rich content. The fact that travelers really feel like they have all the options and all the functionalities in one tool rather than missing out on certain options that they may not otherwise have if they’re not booking directly with the airline. So that’s something that we really see as great.

Seth Anagnostis: Yeah, I think that’s you hit on a key area there because one of the things that we think about a lot at Spotnana is that we have our own content engine, which allows us to ingest content from a variety of different sources. But the key thing that coincides with it is that we have a partner-focused ecosystem. Enabling TMCs and technology partners in particular to use our platform to run their business, which includes their being able to make use of the content that we make available. They’re not required to use every connection that we have. We basically present them with and say, “Here’s who we are plugged into. Here is why we chose to plug into them. Does that suit your business strategy?”. When Kyte thinks about that, and as you bring on new airlines and as you continue to expand that functionality, that allows us then to represent you better as a partner as we are selling to our own partners in terms of explaining, “Hey, here is why, from our perspective, it’s a no-brainer to make use of this content.”

Alice Ferrari: That I think that’s great because often corporates we’re pigeonholed into just a very narrow selection of partners where they could access content. Whereas today you’re saying, “Look, there’s a great array of solutions. Does this, as you say, fit your strategy? Does this resemble sort of the type of experience that you envisage when booking travel?” because ultimately travelers are so much savvier now and they really want to book in the same or better way that they normally book when they’re traveling for leisure.

Seth Anagnostis: Yeah, that’s the goal. We think just because it’s a corporate experience doesn’t mean it has to be worse. And we’re constantly thinking of new features and functions that we can add where somebody can say, “Oh my gosh, that’s actually better than what I’ve experienced on my own”. That’s, we’re reaching a fun part in our own business where now we can build out functionality around unused credits and around how upgrades work and things where the corporate traveler would say, “Oh, wait a minute, I actively want to go into this tool that my company’s offering me as opposed to doing it because I’m nervous about getting a slap on the wrist”.

Alice Ferrari: That’s great. I love that.

Seth Anagnostis: So Alice, dovetailing off the NDC conversation we had earlier. I won’t make you talk about NDC anymore, but NDC is transitioning. The topic of conversation in the industry these days is about the transition to offers and orders. Where we do see a number of airlines that are making really massive investments in terms of offers and orders. We at Spotnana in particular, one of the key components of the way that our platform works is that we are order ready from day one because we have our own system of record that isn’t reliant on the PNR. Is that something you are thinking about strategically for your business in terms of where does Kyte fit into that world as it becomes less of an edge case and more like the actual way that most major airlines are doing business? Is it something where if you just continue to work in the way that you’re working, that will be a natural fit? Like how are you thinking about this kind of next transition in the industry?

Alice Ferrari: Offer and order management and OOSD as it’s called by IATA. It’s something that’s always really excited me, although we need to find a better name for it. I think if done properly, it will unlock massive opportunities, not just in terms of revenue for the airline, but also for the ability for the airline to really engage in a meaningful way with customers by putting the right options, the right functionalities in front of customers. And I think it’s great that there are a number of companies out there that are prepared for this world where we will no longer be limited by PNRs and EMDs, et cetera.

I think it opens up a great opportunity for Kyte. Whilst we’re not building anything strongly related to offers and orders now, I think first of all, because it’s supposed to open up the possibility for airlines to offer more rich content. Having a more dynamic API partner that can help you get this content across will be very strategic to airlines, and that’s where we see Kyte initially positioned as an innovation playground for an airline. We can adapt much faster than a traditional API provider. If an airline wants to try a new ancillary, a new bundle, we’re there for them.

The second thing we’re looking at, and that’s probably where Kyte is directed, but it’s not a sort of short-term plan, is we want to help airlines create bundles more dynamically. Today, an airline—a low-cost or NDC airline—will probably have maybe two, three, four types of fares. They’re quite static. No matter who you are, no matter what time you’re traveling, you will always get those two or three types of fare bundles. We would like to… we envisage a world where airlines can offer maybe 20 different options of bundles where Kyte would play a role in that and driven by data, we would be putting in front of the customer the right bundle for them. It might be a bundle that already includes Wi-Fi onboard, and that may drive the conversion of that customer because it already has something that’s meaningful to that traveler versus someone else who may want a certain special meal or a pet in the cabin, you name it. But just being able to help airlines build these options more dynamically based on the customer’s needs. I think that’s where Kyte will play a role in the midterm, mid to longer term.

Seth Anagnostis: That sounds very fun for your business because as you are working with your airline partners, it sounds like you can do some subtle encouragement of saying, “Hey, have you thought about using these, this API in a different way based on what it’s capable of?”. You’re constantly reselling to existing partners to make sure that they understand how that works. But then equally, I’m sure you’re pretty excited that you know that you have created such a relationship that there’s probably conversations happening behind closed doors at your partners that you’re not involved in at all, where they’re probably coming up with creative ideas that you haven’t thought of, and based on what you’ve built, you probably have a way where, “Yeah, like we can absorb that right away”. Once you’re ready to do that, it has to be pretty fun waiting for where they might take you on that journey.

Alice Ferrari: You got it, Seth. Exactly.

Seth Anagnostis: So how, looking forward, how do you define success in the future of the company? Six years is already a pretty long time in the startup journey. So you’re obviously quite resilient. Things are resonating with the market. But what does success ultimately look like for the company? Is it that today you have X transactions and tomorrow you want 10x or 100x? Or are you chasing a different metric, or is it something around the profitability of your partners, which then enables you to work with them in deeper ways? Like what is it that you are hoping to accomplish for the company in the long run?

Alice Ferrari: Yeah. Another great question. Of course, right now, the North Star metric, so to speak, is of course volume. If the bookings are growing, that’s a healthy sign for our business, and that means that we’re doing well. Ultimately, we are value driven, meaning that the idea is to help airlines improve their yields or drive really higher yielding bookings out of third-party partners. Whether that’s by including the right ancillaries, whether that’s by pushing towards the higher bundles, that’s the ultimate goal for us.

Success is tied to what we’re able to build in the midterm plan. Of course, building this sort of great standardized API and connecting airlines with the travel ecosystem is the main mission. But being able to also allow airlines not just to distribute their content, but create better content to distribute, that is the ultimate objective for Kyte. And one that we hope to achieve within the next sort of two to three years.

Seth Anagnostis: Yeah. So a bit of a flywheel: more volume gets you more adoption, which then allows you to build better content, which then leads to more volume. So that’s great that your different goals feed towards the same direction.

Alice Ferrari: Yeah, that’s it. Exactly.

Seth Anagnostis: Okay, so since this is The Travel is a Human Emotion Podcast, Alice, and you referenced early on that you got into this business with a passion, and I don’t know, I think probably of the last ten times we’ve spoken, you’ve probably been in eight different countries during those conversations. I would like to close by asking your thoughts on the connection between travel and human emotion. What are your thoughts based on your experience in the industry, but also knowing that you are a super avid and passionate traveler yourself?

Alice Ferrari: Yeah. I do have some CO2 emissions on my conscience, which I should be offsetting better, but I am a veggie, so hopefully that offsets a little bit of my impact. No, it’s totally true. I think travel is completely a human emotion, and that’s what led me to join this world. Just getting personal, my mom used to work for our national carrier in Italy, and that’s how I was from early days, 30 years ago, I was exposed to this industry. And it was a very different industry back then. First of all, traveling was basically only for the elite. There weren’t many low-cost options available. Flying was much more expensive. And so having this exposure into this world that you were either in or out made me really excited about it and made me very curious. And of course, find what you love and let it take over your life, and here we are. But it’s definitely the emotion of traveling, of going on the next adventure, of being a part of this world, that really drives me. I love, because I spent a lot of time in airports, I love watching people at arrivals when they hug and they see each other. And I always think how amazing to be part of it and to be contributing towards that. It just makes me very emotional.

Seth Anagnostis: Alice, thanks so much for joining us today on the podcast. We really appreciate your time and your partnership.

Alice Ferrari: Thank you so much for having me, Seth. It’s been great.