Travolution Connects Preview: Gemma Timmons from OAG

A series of Q&As with selected speakers ahead of their appearance at Travolution Connects, the new event from Eventiz by Travelsoft

Gemma Timmons is Director of Operations and Chief of Staff for OAG. She is responsible for execution across OAG's most complex technology and commercial programmes, including go-to-market, AI adoption, and more.

Your panel discussion at Travolution Connects will cover the theory and practice of what we’re calling “the new travel tech stack”. What is your bigger-picture view on this?

For the best part of the last decade, the old travel tech stack underpinned the familiar travel lifecycle of ‘inspire, search, book, experience’. Each phase was sequential and fragmented, and so too was the tech stack underneath it. However, this cycle is condensing, and with it we’re seeing this stack collapse and rebuild at the same time.

Take the search and booking funnel as an example: this has shifted many times in the last few decades, from having a search box on desktop, to mobile web then apps, to chat and now agentic search. By introducing booking flows earlier than the linked-to sites, this has shifted where value to the traveller is captured and created, and simplifying the workflow for the traveller – as well as increasing the pressure on the industry infrastructure underpinning it. This offers an opportunity and a catalyst for the travel tech stack to shift. Decisions that used to happen on the screen travellers looked at are beginning to happen inside the system doing the work for them.

What is increasingly important are the foundations for this new travel tech stack, that workflows rely on: infrastructure that holds up under exponential look-to-book ratios, and trusted data. 

All this has changed what a tech stack even is. A tech stack is no longer ‘just’ a series of applications, or systems of record; rather, it is becoming an intelligence layer against which decisions can be made.

So where does OAG sit in this new tech stack?

For nearly a century, OAG has been supporting millions of daily decisions shaping how the world travels with our data, technology and expertise. For most of that time, our job was to be the system of record for data, and to deliver this data accurately. However, the questions our partners face are more complex, more urgent, and more consequential than ever before – and raw data alone can't answer them. What's needed is intelligence — the ability to see patterns, anticipate shifts, and turn complexity into clarity. 

In the new tech stack, our trusted, deep and neutral data continues to be the foundational layer. We are now building the suite of intelligence products that advances well beyond it, combining base fare, ancillary pricing, schedule context, and operational signals in a single, trusted, queryable layer.

Does your legacy give you a competitive advantage, or are there startups, scaleups or potential new market entrants using AI tools to source and replicate what OAG can offer?

The things that define our company also reinforce one another – there is the data itself, the neutrality baked into the data, but there’s also long-lasting relationships built on trust.  

We’re a 97-year-old company with decades of comprehensive, accurate and timely schedule capacity, pricing and status data across the global aviation system. Hundreds of airline schedules, over a billion status updates a year, over four trillion historical airfares, over 97% of worldwide flight coverage. This data quality, quantity and access is not something that can be easily and accurately replicated at scale.

One of the many reasons why we are excited about the future is that our neutrality supports the trust placed in us by airlines. Airlines share data with us because they trust the model we operate under, and they get market intelligence in return that they could otherwise not see. The relationships and the trust that come from nearly a century in business is arguably the hardest thing for anyone new to manufacture. 

Building out a standard and structure for airline data is effectively creating a rising tide, because we provide a robust and solid data foundation which lifts the capabilities of the new tech stacks can be built.

Do you see any threats?

The biggest threat is always internal, rather than external – the risk of becoming comfortable with the status quo and slowing down, rather than building what’s next. However, we don’t plan to decelerate with age. As we approach our centenary, we're treating it as a starting line, not a finish line; staying close to our customers and inventing on their behalf through data and intelligence.

Are you seeing a shift in what your clients are demanding from you?

Absolutely, although having access to high-quality neutral data is even more non-negotiable. But we’ve started to see clients want it delivered in a form that is readable by their human teams, integrateable into the new tech stacks, as well as ingestible by the AI systems comprising the new stacks.  

At the same time, there’s a move away from ‘give us the data, we’ll decide what it means’ towards requests for the underlying intelligence and the signals derived from the data. 

We are also seeing growing demand for connectivity. Clean data in silos is no longer the bar - clients increasingly expect connected data with interoperability across systems, alongside our strong governance over how that data is used, to increase their visibility across connected datasets.

How does interoperability and connectivity of data play out in the real world?

The reality of AI is that even if you have a large set of perfectly clean data, if the data you’re using it with is partial, incomplete or inaccurate then the end outcome often falls short. We’ve talked about this in a blog post – we came up with the idea of “partial in, partial out”. 

So, if an AI travel planner suggests a Munich to Bangkok routing via Istanbul with a 70-minute connection, it might be the case that the schedule data is accurate, so the planner surfaces this as a viable route. But if the AI agent has no minimum connecting time data, or if terminal transfer logic or transit rules are missing, out-of-date or misleading, it could still  very confidently recommend the routing even though the on the ground experience will be at best a stressful dash between gates or a missed connection.

As well as looking into the new tech stack, your panel at Travolution Connects will consider build versus buy. What’s your take on this?

I think what’s interesting is that the question itself has changed. Today, ‘build’ doesn’t necessarily mean 50 engineers and three years of effort. With the right models and tooling, a small team can build products far, far quicker than was possible, even in the recent past.

But there needs to be deep domain knowledge and expertise underpinning this shift. Understanding travel and aviation helps these smaller teams not only identify which tools are the most appropriate on a use-case by use-case basis but also how the end-product fits within the systems and flows they are targeted at.

A deep understanding of the industry combined with AI tools becomes a moat of sorts against generalist technology and software providers trying to enter the industry without experience of the workflows, without an awareness of where value is created and without understanding what customers really need. 

So how do you see this AI-enabled travel tech ecosystem playing out?

It’s a very big question, so I’ll save the full answer for the panel…! but here’s a short answer. We all now have a fabulous opportunity here to really rethink and improve the ways that our industry has served travellers. What is clear is that the quality of the underlying information is becoming even more critical to connect data, intelligence and execution. 

Travolution Connects is a new event brand for the UK market from Travolution’s parent company Eventiz by Travelsoft. It is an invitation-only senior leaders event, with the launch event taking place on June 23 in London. For more details, visit the Travolution Connects web site and for sponsorship or guest list queries, please contact andy.hibberd@travolution.com.

Other Travolution Connects Previews:

Roopak Pati, managing director, Oppenheimer & Co Inc

Manuel Hilty, CEO and co-founder, Nezasa

Sarah Ditton, director of customer success, Alyza

Casper Maasdam, Managing Director, Europe Operations 

Chelsea Dickenson, Founder, Holiday Expert