Touchdown Travels Is The Android Of Travel Industry – Ekundayo
Chief Operating Officer, Touchdown Travels, Olufunso Ekundayo
The Chief Operating Officer, Touchdown Travels, Olufunso Ekundayo, in this interview with EDET UDOH, speaks on the activities of Touchdown Travels in using technology to render services and drive processes; the effect of COVID-19; high rates of Forex and high operating cost amongst other issues affecting the travels and tourism industry in Nigeria. Excerpts:
Can we meet you, please? Who is Olufunso Ekundayo?
Olufunso Ekundayo is first and foremost a travel and technology enthusiast. I am also the Chief Operation Officer here at Touchdown Travels. I see myself as someone who is in the travel industry to solve travel problems using technology because I see technology as the future of travel.
For the benefit of our readers who may not be familiar with your company’s background, would you please tell us how Touchdown Travels evolved?
Touchdown Travels is a travel management company that has been in existence for over 28 years and being a travel management company means that we take care of the entire spectrum of travel; from your ticket to hotel services, car hire services, protocols, and auxiliary services such as lounge access. For us at Touchdown Travels, what we do is to let you sit back and relax while we take care of everything that pertains to your travel. As far as travelling is concerned, Touchdown Travels will take you anywhere in the world – points A to B.
Touchdown recently launched its Corporate Self-Booking Tool (CSBT). What are the major features of the tool and what benefits does it bring to your clients, prospects, and the industry at large?
The CSBT is the first of its kind of this magnitude. CSBT is a functional tool that navigates the different services that the corporate world requires, as it relates to flights, hotel packages, and transfers, among others. What it does is that it automates all the components of travel; fusing them all into one solution and what that means is Self-Booking! CSBT bundles all the travelling processes together in such a way that an employee of an organization can make a travelling request because they have enough information to be able to make informed decisions. You don’t need to send emails back and forth – with CSBT, within minutes, you are done.
CSBT is also able to seamlessly integrate with the existing approval systems within various organizations, which is key because we know very well that most organizations have what we call travel policies. CSBT application is smart; it understands the travel policy that applies to you, but more importantly, the approvals that are within the system, it can also imbibe them.
We have integrated the system for large corporations such as banks, and multinationals. We have done this for about 7,000 travel-enabled staff, and we have been able to integrate this with these organizations. Infinite possibilities of approvals can be accommodated by the system so no matter how complex your approval system is; CSBT can take care of it.
What other innovative tools or ideas are in place at Touchdown Travels?
As said earlier, we leverage a whole lot on technology. Apart from CSBT, which is for Business-to-Business (B-B), we also have packages for business-to-customer (B-C). We have the Application Interface (API) that allows us to connect and integrate with third-party solutions seamlessly and this has helped us with some integration with the Internet banking applications of some banks to book flights. We are the android of the travel industry. We are opening up our systems without enclosing anything because we believe access to travel should be easy. We believe everybody should be able to make informed decisions. Travel is not a luxury as they say; it is something that we should do as a culture.
Another innovation we have out there is EasyPay, which enables instalment payment for flight tickets. Some might want to travel but by the time they check the prices and the prices are not what they can afford at that time, they give up. They don’t know that there are high and low seasons. However, with the introduction of Easy Pay, we allow you to look at those prices and we lock it down for you to give
you minimal fees and you can pay in instalments. For example, a ticket that is sold at N350, 000 in the low season, can be sold for N700,000 to N800,000 in the high season. With Easy Pay, the rates are unbelievable. This enables you to make your payment over time. So imagine you have N365,000 you have to pay over three months and in three months you end up paying your N365,000. That is the convenience we are bringing because we want to get more people to travel. Easy pay cuts across everything we do – It’s available for flight, and it’s also available for packaging. We understand that it’s not just sufficient that people want to travel.
Easy Pay takes care of the entire experience of your travels. Also, our website, www.touchdowntravels.net, is one of the technologically advanced websites you will see in terms of innovation. With the website, we can provide the cheapest price rates for tickets on different routes for every airline.
What am I trying to say? When you check our website, what you will always find is the cheapest price. That is our corporate proposition because we want to get more people. We want to give people a trusted partner who will be fair enough to show them the best destinations and routes at the cheapest price. That is basically what we are offering.
When people think about COVID, they remember the travel restrictions, the health challenges it brought, and how that affected the industry negatively. In what ways did COVID influence innovations in the industry?
Those who refuse to learn from history will always repeat the mistakes of the past. COVID-19 taught us that there is a need for us to always think and plan. It shows us
that if your business is not affected by the weather of the day; it might be affected by the climate. Who would have thought then that the industry would move to no flight – bringing global economies to a standstill? Nobody expected it. Some people still find it hard to believe that there were some positives. COVID-19 brought a new mindset to the people who are willing to embrace change. It came with the fact that there is a need to innovate or you die. It came with the understanding that we need to channel our lives to solve problems. COVID-19 gave us the opportunity to think and rebuild and these are what we are doing at Touchdown today.
Touchdown has rebranded to say that, yes, we are old, we have the knowledge, we have the expertise of the past but at the same time, we are still innovative, and we are still taking you to the future. COVID-19 gave us time to reflect and see where exactly we are. What are the customers saying? What do they need? How do we move and channel them into the future? I tell you that the flight that will take us to the future is technology so we need to get on board with it, understand it, master it, and use it to solve problems as we go.
The travel industry appears to be struggling with increased operational costs due to inflation. How is that affecting the demand in the industry and what do you think can be done to stabilize the situation?
The current prevailing challenges are not affecting only the Travel industry. It’s affecting Nigeria as a whole viz-a-viz the businesses. In the Aviation industry, you have the issue of the unstable prices of aviation fuel and you need to understand that every single thing has a ripple effect and that is what we are experiencing regarding some of the airlines that have issues with aviation fuel prices. Access to Foreign exchange is another challenge that is affecting businesses in Nigeria because everything that we do in the aviation industry revolves around Forex; airliners that are doing their business in the dollar cannot repatriate their funds so I will say the solution here is going to be internal for us as a country, and there must be a policy change.
We need to understand that for things to work, the ease of doing business needs to be improved. Ease of doing business cuts across Forex, it cuts across remittances of funds, it cuts across operational cost, it cuts across everything. Because of the inability to remit funds, some airliners are threatening to pull out of the country soon and you might say why? Are they not making money? They are making money but if all your expenses are in dollars but you are making money in Naira and you cannot access forex, it gets to the point that the money does not make any sense. That is what is happening in the industry. In the end, customers are the people to pay for all these and that is what it is at the moment.
What Policy do you think should be put in place?
It should start with the policy on the Forex because right now most companies cannot access it at the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) rate. There has to be a balance. The government should sit down with the industry stakeholders and experts to draft a new policy because sometimes when a policy is drafted without input from the insiders or taking into consideration the insiders’ perspective such policies end up not being useful. We should also understand that we do not have a national carrier. If we have a national carrier we will say that there is a plan to expand the reach of that carrier to every location but everything we have is impotent in this case.
Touchdown Travels appear to be a real innovative hub for the travel industry. What set Touchdown apart from others? What’s the secret to being an innovative travel management company?
Touchdown Travels was founded by our Managing Director, Mr. Dayo Adeola, 28 years ago. For a business to have survived for 28 years as a top three travel company in Nigeria, then there is something they are doing right. The core values of Touchdown have always revolved around three things – Customer service, feedback, and process. We listen to our customers because feedback is essential. At Touchdown, we desire to be there for you always. What we do is to listen to our customers and innovate with these processes as we move along because these processes are the things that make life easy for the customers – helping you to move from point to point without you having to stress yourself. We do this with highly skilled staff. Our staffs are very important to us. We train our staff to make sure they are top-notch because that is the only way we can deliver best-in-class services to our customers. After all, we cannot give what we do not have. Training of our staff, customer service, feedback, and processes are the building blocks and the foundation that helps Touchdown Travels to grow. At Touchdown Travels, we understand what works; we understand what our customers are looking for – we listen, we innovate and we evolve. That is what Touchdown is known for.
The travel and tourism industry appears to be faced with several challenges such as Security concerns, unpredictable exchange rates, and increasing airline fuel prices among others. What do you think the government and other stakeholders can do to help overcome these challenges?
Tourism domestically has been badly hit because of the issue of insecurity and a whole lots need to be done. A lot of people believe it is safer to travel outside the country than to visit tourist sites in Nigeria. The government needs to provide security around tourist sites in the country and the ability or capacity to manage those tourist facilities must be improved. When there is a turnaround, travel managers and companies will be willing to invest in those facilities. The gap in moving from point A to point B makes security necessary and that is where government comes in to provide security. A lot of Nigerians said they are safer when they are outside the country than when they are in the country and those are the challenges we need to solve.
