Air Canada on FlightPass, NDC, and the agentic future

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 Keith Wallis, Managing Director of Customer and Digital and Distribution at Air Canada. Lots of words. In the industry, Keith is often described as one of the central architects of modern airline distribution — someone who has spent over 25 years ensuring that when you press “book” while you’re trying to book, you are actually buying what you want to buy.

Keith, thanks so much for joining us. Can you please introduce yourself?

Keith Wallis: Hey Seth, thanks for having me here. It’s a genuine pleasure and I appreciate all the kind words. Yeah, so my name is Keith and I’m responsible for a few things at Air Canada — most notably my passion for a long time, distribution and NDC, but also hopefully the future of our airline and how we’re going to move into modern airline retailing, supporting offers, orders, settlement, and delivery.

It’s a really exciting time for the airline industry as we grapple with the topic of agentic commerce. So lots going on, lots to talk about. I’ve been here 30 years now — would you believe this summer? 30 years at Air Canada. And I thought I had seen it all, but this industry never ceases to amaze.

Seth Anagnostis: Well, I think when I came up to Air Canada a few months ago and met so many people who had been there 20 or 25 or 30 — or in some cases 40 — years, I think it certainly speaks to the culture you all have developed, that people want to spend their entire careers there.

Which I think actually gets to one of the key things that we always like to talk about when people ask why this podcast is named what it is. We have it on the back of our shirts that we wear at industry events — “travel as a human emotion.” You spend so much of your time focused on APIs and offer, order, settle, deliver — terms you come to know once you’re in the industry, but that folks outside it might not know, even though they experience your brand.

Can you tell me, to start: how do you take the sea of industry acronyms and find the human emotion that’s in travel, which is the reason why we love being here in the first place?

Keith Wallis: I love that question, Seth. And I actually talk about this a lot with my team. Being a more technology-focused team, it’s easy to lose sight of the fact that what we’re doing every day is affecting — hopefully positively — people’s everyday lives as they travel around the world. We do focus a lot on the technology we’re building and making sure that we’re building things that are strong, scalable, stable, and that people can rely on.

But you can lose sight of the fact sometimes that the reason you’re doing that is there are travelers on your planes every day who are experiencing, interacting with, and often depending on the technology we’re building to make their travel experience as exceptional as we want it to be. I try to make it human and personal for all of our team members. I say: you sit here in the office every day and you build this wonderful technology but you yourself travel for business and for pleasure, and you have friends and family who are traveling all the time. Most Air Canada employees experience this: if you’re at a dinner party or a family gathering and somebody learns that you work for an airline — or Air Canada specifically — you invariably get those questions. “My last trip, this happened to me, why?” And, “Why doesn’t your app do this?” And, “I was trying to use your website and this didn’t happen.”

It’s a very real-world example of how what we do every day directly impacts what people experience when they’re traveling with us. So we try to tie that back into even all of our sprint planning and our PIs — we’re doing this because it’s going to enrich our customers’ travel experience by doing X or Y. And if we can instill in our teammates, while they’re doing their work, the thought of how this will make their life better when they travel — or their parents’ lives better, or their best friends’ lives better — it ties together that human emotion you feel when you experience a new place.

The travel experience, hopefully, is something that is wonderful but also seamless, something that just fades into the background — not something you have to worry about. That’s what we’re trying to do every day here.

Seth Anagnostis: I think that philosophy is probably indicative of why you have so many friends in the industry, because I think a lot of folks would say, “OK, I’m just the guy you blame if you happen to be on a flight where the Wi-Fi didn’t work for a few minutes.” Instead, you see it as: how can we use the magic of what we do to really engage with folks and make them feel like a part of our community.

I think part of what you were saying there, Keith, transitions perfectly into the first set of things I wanted to talk to you about today. I heard a lot about how we’re evolving what we’re doing and how we’re thinking about continually giving people a new, fresh set of experiences. And going back decades now, as I was preparing for what we wanted to talk about today, I kept seeing the number of times Air Canada has been one of the first in some way — first to build a direct API, one of the first to introduce a small business portal, one of the first to subscribe to Routehappy, which is where you and I met about 10 years ago,

jumping on board with different things around NDC and how they aggregate, and then exploring subscription services like FlightPass. That’s just a beginning set of some of the innovations that Air Canada has either been first or among the first in pushing in the industry. So my question for you is: how does Air Canada always manage — as the industry has evolved over numerous years and in different contexts — to end up being one of the first?

Keith Wallis: Wow. Well, on behalf of all my colleagues who have made all of those firsts happen, I’ll just say thank you for the recognition. It’s nice to know that we’re being noticed in a positive way. I’d say a couple of things. Some of us here kind of refer to Air Canada as the Goldilocks airline. We’re not too big and we’re not too small. We’re not so big that inertia weighs us down and it becomes difficult to move quickly and be nimble. And in maybe the US context, you have three big airlines who are always dramatically competing with each other. We compete ferociously for transatlantic business, trans-Pacific business, business across the border into the US. But it’s not the same dynamic. The fact that we’re big enough to have scale inside the company, so we can actually put resources against moving quickly — but we’re not so big that it’s difficult to move quickly — kind of helps us be that entrepreneurial mid- to large-size airline. That’d be one thing. Two, I’d say permission and maybe even encouragement from the top down.

Our current CEO, Mike, and going back to Calin before him and even before him, have always encouraged us to think with an entrepreneurial mindset and given us permission to move quickly, break things, and recover quickly — to try new things. We have that kind of permission from our executive team on down. And then maybe third, I’d say we just have this consistent presence across the senior leadership in both commercial and IT of people who are genuinely passionate about what we do. You hear some of my colleagues speak about the digital innovations they want to try — they’re not doing it because it’s their job. They genuinely love it. These are people who read about it at night because they love it. We’ve just got this mindset that we love to deploy new features and enable new capabilities that we’re going to love using — and that we think our passengers and our customers are going to love using. So yeah, it’s a combination: we’re just the right size of airline, we’ve got permission from the top, we’ve got passionate people doing the work who really love what they do. And that’s true of a lot of airlines. It just seems to all come together and really work for us.

Seth Anagnostis: So with all of that said — innovation from the top, being the right size, building the partner network you’ve named — surely not all of those have just been green lights where hey, we have a great idea and we’re moving forward with it and it’s super easy. As we look at innovation, it’s about being able to take that risk and jump in, but also knowing that inherent to the nature of that is that not everything is going to work all the time.

Has there been any innovation that you or your teams have driven over the last 30-ish years that was either really scary to get a green light on, or impossible to get approved until you finally reached the summit?

Keith Wallis: Man, Seth, they’re all terrifying at some point, right? You’re pushing the envelope, going out there where none or few have tried before, and trying something different. Yeah, they’re all nerve-wracking to some extent. I’d say the one that generated the most anxiety recently was when we had a very tough decision to make about our NDC technology — about how we wanted to do it.

We had been a Farelogix or Accelya customer for a number of years leading up to when we transitioned to being a host PSS airline. We were always super happy with Accelya — a great company to work with. Our technology just went in a different direction overall when we migrated to our PSS. And we had a really hard decision to make: did we want to stay working with a partner and rely on outsourced technology to drive this? We tried ATPCO Exchange for about a year or two until ATPCO decided they didn’t want to be in that business anymore. And we had to make a really quick, difficult decision about whether we wanted to go back and buy something from someone or build on our own. There were a few of us who felt very strongly that building this from the ground up ourselves — and controlling that roadmap — was strategically important. We had to convince a lot of our executive team that that was the right thing to do, because it was a muscle we didn’t necessarily have at the airline — a skill set we didn’t have. We knew the business of NDC, but we’d never built our APIs ourselves. So we had to stand up a team, set up processes, and we had to do it really quickly — in a matter of about six to eight months.

It was a very nerve-wracking, challenging time. But I look back on that now and I’m so happy we made that decision, because owning our own technology strategy — being able to build exactly what we want to build, how we want to build it, when we want to build it, to move faster if we think it’s valuable, put more resources there, slow down if we need to stop and think — has proven to be one of the reasons we’ve been so successful. So it was a really tough decision and a really challenging one, and we all had to believe that doing this ourselves was the right thing. I don’t think there are many airlines who build their own NDC technology. But it has proven to be our differentiator.

Seth Anagnostis: Yeah, that’s an interesting angle, because from the outside we just see the end result. We see the innovation. We see the press releases. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that everybody along the way was completely aligned on how to get there. The amount of alignment you had to create to do something that ends up being a central part of your strategy for years going forward — so much goes into that before the public or even your close partners end up seeing those results.

Keith Wallis: Yeah. Our two biggest partners — we’re in a joint venture with United and Lufthansa — they’re both Accelya customers for NDC. Happy Accelya customers. We get asked, and we ask ourselves all the time: is it the right time? Should we reevaluate this? And we keep coming back to: we’ve got something really good here, it’s paying dividends for us. And we just find ways to work with our JV partners, even though they host or build technology a different way. But yeah, when you’re doing something yourself, you always have to ask: is this still working for us?

Seth Anagnostis: Okay. So one thing that you definitely don’t do is do things just by yourself — because the angle, and with you on this podcast in particular, Keith, I wanted to hear a little bit from you about how you think about partnership. Of course, Air Canada, United, and Lufthansa Group work super closely together as airlines. But one thing that you specifically have made a key part of your leadership philosophy and how you actually drive innovation is doing it from an industry perspective and from the inside. And I think that’s sometimes surprising to people as they get into aviation in particular — that you see that you can be a disruptor and push new technologies and do something that other airlines might view as completely different from the way they’re approaching things, but you can still be a good member of the industry that’s trying to drive things forward. By this, I really mean you’re a regular in leadership roles with IATA, ATPCO, ARC, and UATP. If you’re playing conference panel bingo, I’m almost certain you’ve been on stage with at least each of those — and not just on panels, but in actual leadership roles. So how do you think about pushing from the inside while being a central part of the industry architecture and still representing Air Canada’s interests? How do you reconcile those things?

Keith Wallis: Yeah, it stems from things like being so deeply integrated with — and getting so much value from being so deeply integrated with — United and Lufthansa, but also just with the general industry. I’ll use NDC as an example, but this applies across a number of areas in our airline. You can innovate and be super successful innovating in your own ecosystem for your own customers. But at some point you hit a bit of a plateau. Our industry is so deeply integrated, and we as an airline — more so maybe than a lot of others — rely heavily on the network effect of having Lufthansa, United, and our other partners integrated closely with our business so that we can get our customers anywhere they want to go in the world as seamlessly and as easily as possible.

That means we are relying on processes and technologies from other airlines to support and serve our customers. So it became obvious to us very early that it would be really important to push strategies and consensus at the industry level to make sure we’re getting as much as we can done on our customers’ behalf. So you’re right — we participate heavily at IATA, at ARC, at ATPCO, at UATP, and we do it at high-level board and council levels. We consciously make available time from our most valuable resources to work on working groups, because we feel like we have something to offer. We feel like we’ve got experience and expertise in some areas where we can help the industry move. And for sure, we can move a bit more nimbly and a bit more quickly ourselves. But it’s important for us to drive that change across the industry so that we can reliably send our customers out into the world across a network of carriers and rely on our partners to treat our customers the way that we treat them. That network effect is why we work so hard to help the industry progress in general.

Seth Anagnostis: Then what happens when it doesn’t? What happens when you are convinced that something is right for the industry and the industry is not moving that way — or when you believe something is right for Air Canada, but there’s some tension with what’s being discussed in those industry forums?

Keith Wallis: Yeah.

Like any good family, there are always disagreements. There are fights. There’s a yelling match. You stand up and you leave the room. Look, we’re passionate, but we’re passionately Canadian — we’re always trying to be polite about it. And honestly, some of our best debates at the industry level have resulted in a better outcome than what we started with. I would say we’re never so vain as to think we’ve got it right. And I would also say that we have a recognition that even if we believe we’re supremely right, it almost doesn’t matter — because our customers are going to go out there and travel with us connecting to other airlines, and we have to make that work. So sometimes that just means a bit of compromise, because in the end it’s in the best interest of our customers.

Like any good negotiation, the best ones are when both sides are unhappy with the result, right? So we definitely try to push forward things we believe in strongly. But I can’t think of any time where we’ve walked away and said, “Well, we’re just going to do it our way, guys, and if you don’t see it that way, that’s too bad.” I always tell my team and my colleagues: when you go to these industry events, you don’t take your Air Canada hat off and check it at the door, but you certainly put an industry hat on over top of it. And you have to remember that when you’re in these working groups or councils, you’re working at an industry level for the good of the industry. You’re serving our customers because our customers are using these other carriers to complete their travel, and we need to make it work for them. So ultimately, there’s got to be some kind of compromise.

Seth Anagnostis: I love that concept of putting the industry hat on top of your Air Canada hat — they’re not mutually exclusive. I think that’s probably pretty deeply embedded into the way you all work.

So let me transition now to talk about the partnership that we just recently announced. Our teams have obviously been working hard together behind the scenes for quite a while, but we were both very excited to share about a couple of different forms of partnership that Spotnana and Air Canada are working on together, and are going to really look at as a foundation for how we build even more — and potentially brand new things — together in the future.

Keith Wallis: Thank you.

Seth Anagnostis: Can you tell our listeners a little bit about what we’re doing together? And in particular, given the way that Spotnana’s technology works — as a clean-slate architecture with our own system of record and a ground-up approach to how we build technology — tell us a little bit about how we are working together and why Spotnana appealed to you as a partner.

Keith Wallis: Yeah. So I’ll say that we couldn’t have been more excited and more happy when you all decided that you wanted to work with us and build out connectivity to our NDC API into the Spotnana travel platform. It was a bit of a watershed moment for us. There were a few high fives around the office when we were like, “Spotnana wants to work with us.”

Seth Anagnostis: Wow.

Keith Wallis: But like I said, we’re the little big airline, right? We’re often in line before the big ten or big fifteen airlines. It was kind of a match made in heaven — we’ve got that scrappy entrepreneurial attitude, and we kind of saw some of that — a lot of that, actually — in Spotnana. And I’d say what was what was so compelling about working with you and the Spotnana team was that your conversations with us were very much about: tell us how you guys work, tell us what you want to get out of being part of the Spotnana ecosystem for your customers, and let us make that happen for you. You know, there are often things that are a compromise, and we never really felt that working with you guys.

You were very much focused on — and have always been, and still are — how can we help Air Canada be successful, and we will adapt to you in many ways. You were taking the burden off us to compromise or adapt or go in a direction we wouldn’t necessarily want to go in order to partner with you. This was very much you being focused on us, which just made it a delightful, easy, simple experience. And the way you’ve built your technology — the strategy of consciously not using or even supporting any of this legacy technology that we all in some form agree is not going to serve us well for the future — and just starting over and saying: if we were building travel solutions from scratch in the modern day, how would we do it? And that’s what we’re going to do. It made integrating simple. It made business challenges easy to overcome. And we’ve been able to accomplish things with Spotnana that to date we haven’t really been able to accomplish anywhere else. So it’s been super exciting. I would say a lot of our success in our NDC program to date has been everywhere but the corporate travel space. And now we’re just so excited to really have some revolutionary technology — some really high-grade capabilities — available for our corporate travel customers.

Seth Anagnostis: Yeah, and that’s foundational for us being in the corporate space. So especially when we see that a partner has really thought about how to make their APIs work in corporate, that’s really great. We do, as an open platform, believe — and I think this is probably an area where we’re aligned — that even as a young tech company, that doesn’t mean you have to do everything on your own. We participate in as many industry forums as we can get our hands on, because we think we need to be able to connect with who our partners are connecting with. And we need to understand the history of what came before us and why things work the way that they do before we can really evolve some of those offerings.

But I think what we really loved about Air Canada as a partner — and you mentioned this in one of our earlier conversations — is that with a modern, open tech stack, we love being able to present to someone who we know to be smart and innovative at an airline and say: here are the things that we have built. How do you actually see that applying bto your ecosystem? And that’s led us — certainly with you, and this will happen more and more over the coming years, we hope — to say: we’re going to tell you what we did, and now you tell us how this applies to things that you’ve built or thought about, and it’ll probably take us down a road together that we might not have expected. And I think that’s exactly what happened with FlightPass in particular, where you came to us and said: there is this thing that is very specific to our home market in Canada nthat is quite unique to the way that our customer base thinks, the way they engage — particularly with Air Canada as the flag carrier — that might not exist in every market in the world, but it really works for us here. So can you tell us a little bit, Keith, about what FlightPass is? Why does the Canadian market love it so much? And why did you say we want Spotnana to incorporate that as one of the foundational innovations as the first thing we do together?

Keith Wallis: I still remember that conversation, Seth. I remember talking about it and I remember seeing your faces, and I was thinking, “Guys, just stick with me. We’ll get there, this is going to be okay.” So Air Canada created this product — my God, it must be about a decade ago or more — called FlightPass. It’s not a revolutionary idea, but it’s proven to be pretty unique for us. It’s basically a bulk buy or subscription buy. Essentially, FlightPass is a product we create that covers a certain geographic zone, and you can buy a set of flights — five, ten, fifteen, twenty flights — that you can then use anywhere within that geographic zone. So we create Eastern Canada flight passes, Trans-Canada flight passes, Eastern Seaboard flight passes for people who travel frequently from Montreal and Toronto down into the Northeastern United States. And we’ve constantly innovated and adapted FlightPass products to cover areas that customers travel a lot between. It used to be a fixed amount — you’d buy ten or fifteen credits. Then we created an unlimited FlightPass, a subscription-based one where you just pay a monthly fee and keep traveling on it. And it allows customers who don’t travel on the same city pair all the time, but do travel in the same geographic zone regularly, to buy an amount of travel in that zone upfront and lock in their pricing. That gives you certainty of price — once you’ve bought it, it’s a fixed amount, you know what you’ve purchased. And look at how volatile our industry is right now: with what is going on, prices are increasing for reasons outside our control, and customers who are on a FlightPass have certainty of price because they purchased it when they did and the price was locked in at that time. Now they can travel with that certainty of spend. So it resonated to a certain extent with retail and leisure customers, but you can see the benefits to a corporate traveler, right?

Keith Wallis: Corporate travel programs are all about understanding, knowing, tracking, reporting on, and managing spend. FlightPass for corporate Canada has proven hugely successful. Corporations love the idea of: I know I have these travelers, they’re always traveling back and forth between Montreal and Toronto, I’ll just buy a corporate FlightPass that anyone in my company can use — and as the corporate travel manager, I get this fixed amount of spend. So I explained all of this to you, and normally I get a reaction from a partner along the lines of, “That’s very niche and it sounds very hard to do. I don’t know how we would do that in our tech stack.” But you guys were like, “Fantastic,” and jumped in with both feet. “I don’t know how we’re going to do it, but we’ll figure it out.” And lo and behold, FlightPass is now available to Spotnana customers. It just goes to that mindset of: we can probably fix any problem, we can probably tackle any opportunity if it makes sense. And I think you guys saw the vision of what this could be. It was really exciting.

Seth Anagnostis: Yeah, I think what we loved there was something that had proven history of being beloved by your customer base, but that needed to work a little differently in a digital world. And as we were envisioning — we knew we were going to do an NDC connection at that time — we were saying: OK, NDC connections are great, but is there a way, if you’re engaging with Air Canada at multiple levels, that you don’t have to go to the Spotnana platform and do one thing and then go somewhere completely different to do the other? I will say there’s a big missed opportunity here, Keith: you didn’t mention all those permutations of Canadian geography for FlightPass. I didn’t hear the one I would most want to take advantage of, which is the maple syrup flight pass. I want to go from wherever the two cities are where the most maple syrup is produced and go back and forth between them whenever I want, depending on exactly what experience I want. Maybe that’s something for us in 2027.

Keith Wallis: I’ll send that off to the marketing and product team. I’ll see what we can do.

Seth Anagnostis: That’s good. We’ll get that one going after the recording. Just to wrap up this section — one of Spotnana’s technological underpinnings is that we say we are order-ready from day one because we maintain our system of record with structured data.

And I know in those industry forums we mentioned earlier, you talk through offer, order, settle, deliver, and what that’s going to do to the industry. And the fact that airlines have always owned the offer — you’ve been quoted as saying that in other contexts. So as order-ready platforms are really emerging over the next few years, as far as you’re concerned — especially as it relates to how we might work together — what is the primary focus of that? Is it on restoring the relationship between the carrier and the buyer? What is it about? What is the problem Air Canada is trying to solve there?

Keith Wallis: Probably a few things, right? In the offer, order, settle, deliver family, offer is the glitzy, sexy thing that everybody focuses on. And it is definitely an opportunity. The challenge we’re trying to solve — or the opportunity we’re trying to create — is for customers to engage with our product even more. We developed fare families 15 or 20 years ago. But they’re very static. We do our best — we constantly tweak and innovate on them, add new ones, kill old ones. So what you see today is very different from what you saw 10 or 20 years ago. But they’re still very fixed things. We hope we have something very close to what every traveler wants. But by nature of the fact that we have six or seven defined choices, it is rarely a perfect match for any customer for their unique travel experience that day. Offer management gives us that opportunity — where we can truly get new technology in place, have that very interactive conversation with customers, and say: tell us what you want and we’ll do our best to put together an offer that matches exactly what you’re looking for today. Not yesterday, not tomorrow, but today. So there’s that.

Order — if you look at every airline that has already started their offer, order, settlement, and delivery journey, almost none of them started with offer, even though it’s the sexy, glitzy member of the four. They all start with order, because honestly, where airlines struggle today even with some of the offers we create is in delivering them reliably at the airport and helping customers through disruption when they have these offers — that’s really challenging with the current order-and-airport-delivery technology we have. So the order technology — and honestly the delivery technology — is so important, because as much as you can create interesting offers that customers really engage with, if you don’t get the fundamentals right when they actually travel, honestly none of the other stuff matters. So order and delivery is very much about making that customer experience, when they actually travel with the product they purchased, seamless, frictionless, and touchless as much as possible. And then I’d say settlement — probably more for us internally — is just about the efficiencies around doing the back-office work we do today to make the way we sell work. It’s just so complicated. And if you do settlement differently because you’ve done order, you can actually bring a lot more efficiency to your airline.

Seth Anagnostis: Yeah. Those four terms coming together — but without even the fifth thing that is now coming in, which is obviously how AI is coming into all of this. I’m sure that’s already impacting offer, order, settle, and deliver. I think that framework was a key part of the industry discussion before even the release of ChatGPT in 2022. And now AI is already so ubiquitous in our lives. But you’ve already been quoted talking about a world where people will have bots working for them.

You even talked about some of the shopping behaviors of your own family — how your children, I believe, are shopping differently than the way you or I might. So how does all that tie in? Or I guess this is really a question for Air Canada specifically: are you going to still be marketing to humans in the future? Or do you have to learn how to market to an algorithm? Will there even be a book button? Or does a trip just happen based on personal and emotional needs that your system is able to figure out for you based on that time? How do you tie together parallel innovations that we know are already colliding, but in ways we can’t even begin to fully understand today?

Keith Wallis: Man, I wish I knew. Does anybody know? My kids — they’re older, adult children now — planned a vacation themselves last year using TikTok and ChatGPT. I’m not even sure they actually visited a travel site, and they trusted the information they got implicitly. Which was amazing to me, but completely natural to them. And we can already measure that people are starting their search for travel in a generic AI assistant like Claude or ChatGPT and then ending up on our website — getting referred there. That’s already happening.

That’s not a long-term projection; that’s what’s happening now. So customers are already going there. And now you’ve seen a few airlines — I think Virgin Atlantic was just out a week or two ago with a GPT-powered tool that actually allows you to interact with the Virgin Atlantic product. You end up having to book on their website, but it’s a much more Virgin Atlantic-focused, tool-driven option within ChatGPT, which is an interesting innovation. Probably not where the future ultimately is, but it speaks to how quickly we’re getting there. And yeah, we’re struggling with this today. We just had meetings about it last week, Seth, where we’re trying to figure out: do people see a book button? Do they see our website? Do they see our mobile app? Do people spend $9.99 a month for a personal version of Claude or ChatGPT where their personal assistant knows them, has access to their wallet, has access to their loyalty cards, knows what their preferences are, knows what hotel brands they like, what airline brands they like? And do they start to just implicitly trust these agents and stop mtalking to a brand anymore — instead talking to their agent, who goes out and talks to the brands for them? And how do you support that? How do we build technology that allows those agents to talk to us on their owner’s behalf? And then when I talk to my marketing friends — who are they marketing to now? Do they market to Seth, or do they market to your agent? And how do you market to your agent? So it might sound like I have a lot of questions and not a lot of answers, but that’s because I have a lot of questions and I don’t have a lot of answers yet. But I think these are at least the questions we have to start asking ourselves. And none of us have decided yet, which is good. But the rapid pace of innovation in this space is so fast that I don’t feel like we have months to figure this out. So it’s going to be another case like what we talked about 30 minutes ago: we’re going to try things quickly, break stuff quickly, fix it if it doesn’t work, and pivot if we’ve got the wrong strategy.

But yeah, we’re starting to think about what technology we need to build and what marketing processes we need to change, if the world goes where it looks like it might be going and customers start to rely more and more on their personal agents to do the work for them. I think that’s going to change how we do technology, how we do marketing. And it means a lot for brand loyalty, too.

Seth Anagnostis: Yeah. And from the way you described it, it seems like it’s no coincidence that one of Air Canada’s recent marketing campaigns — and what you’ve made a key philosophy in terms of some of your fleet improvements in particular — is the term “glowing heart,” which I think is actually probably Air Canada’s version of “travel as a human emotion.” It’s: how do you maintain that connection with your traveler even though it seems clear that nobody really knows exactly how that connection will work. You just know that you still need them to love flying Air Canada at the end of the day. And how you get there is an open mystery that we’ll all be solving in the coming years.

So, just to wrap things up, Keith — one thing we started doing recently at Spotnana’s New York headquarters is an activity where someone presents a hot take to their colleagues. Something they believe in passionately that is typically not the most popular opinion in the room, but they are a thousand percent convinced they’re right and will die on that hill.

Since you’re a pretty straight shooter, I’ll let you either answer this on a professional level — what is the thing in airline distribution that you believe in but that others don’t? Or if you want, you can answer on a personal level too: what’s the take that when you go to a party you want to convince everybody of, even if you’re the only one doing it? Feel free to answer both.

Keith Wallis: Yeah, I don’t know your viewership well enough yet to give a personal hot take. Maybe we’ll do that next time, after I read some of the comments on our first interview. Okay. So a professional hot take — probably a couple that I’ve struggled to convince maybe not all of my colleagues or counterparts at other airlines of, but I have good debates with some. I’ll say one. My first one: the death of codeshare. I hate codeshare. I’ve always hated codeshare. I think it creates more problems than it’s worth.

I know why some departments inside airlines — network planning — like codeshare. And I’m probably going to catch a lot of flack for saying this publicly, but I hate it. I think it creates confusion for our customers. They think they’re traveling on one airline when they’re not. They think they’re going to get a certain product experience when they’ll get something different. And I’m hopeful that one of the benefits of us doing offer and order and settlement properly is that we can get rid of codeshare. That we can go back to interline, where customers truly know what airline they’re traveling on and we can accurately and easily sell each other’s products, tell the customer what they’re getting, and deliver it accurately regardless of who sold it. I think codeshare is super beneficial for airlines and allows us to do things that we want to do that we can’t do without it — but it has these negative unintended consequences for customers. And I’m hoping we can get rid of it. So I’m firmly on Team Interline, and I’m hoping for the death of codeshare.

Seth Anagnostis: Wow, that’s a very strong hot take. I think you would have done well at our office with that one. I think an overlapping hot take there is that people sometimes say “codeshare” when they actually mean “interline,” and say “interline” when they mean “codeshare.” And then you have to figure out whether they’re doing it for a strategic reason you can’t understand, or whether things are just that confusing in our industry that it’s not always clear what you’re even talking about.

Keith Wallis: Yeah, you’re not wrong. You’re not wrong.

Seth Anagnostis: So that’s all we had for today, Keith. Any closing comments before we wrap up?

Keith Wallis: No, this was — the time flew by. This was a fun hour. I hope your listeners get something out of it. I’m anxious to hear some feedback, and I genuinely appreciate you all at Spotnana giving me the chance to come and talk.

Seth Anagnostis: That is truly our pleasure. Always happy to hear from you and Air Canada. Hopefully we’ll get a chance to have a follow-up episode. We’ll have to work on our next innovations together so that we’ll have a few more things to announce and discuss. Thanks, Keith.

Keith Wallis: Looking forward to it. Thanks, Seth.