ICEbreaker, May 2019

Hello and welcome to our monthly newsletter, ICEbreaker from ICE, the travel technology IT consultants.

We’ve got a busy month ahead. We’re delighted to be involved with the first CLIA event dedicated to technology on 11 and 12 June in Hamburg. Let us know if you want to meet up. We’ll also be visiting our clients in Europe, Miami and New York.

A big shout out to our engineer who created a brilliant, witty user guide to migrate one of our clients to Outlook365. Let’s just say tapping into the genius of pirate, Jack Sparrow and some cute dogs makes this whole setup process pain free.

And cue trumpets. We were thrilled to win the Best Tech Services Provider at the biz4biz awards presented by Fiona Bruce. [Add long, emotional thank you speech here.] But seriously, we’re really happy – and it couldn’t have happened without our brilliant team and clients – so thank you.

Until then,

Ian Richardson (Richie) and Conor Byrne 
(ICE's founders)

Quote Of The Month

  “How do you transition from mass marketing to mass personalization? To do that, you’ve really got to unlock the data within that ecosystem in a way that's useful to a customer.”

Steve Easterbrook, CEO, McDonald’s in an interview with WIRED.

Source: Forbes

Number Of The Month

31 billion

There will be 31 billion devices connected to the internet by 2025, according to figures from Statista, and Gartner predicts the average family home will have 500 smart devices by 2022.

Source: Computer Weekly

Articles Of The Month

How clean and green is your favourite cruise line?

With the cruise industry under increasing pressure to sail sustainably and limit its impact on the environment, here’s a comprehensive summary of who’s doing what from itineraries to emissions and waste management.

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Fast fail

If you’re not failing, you’re not trying in today’s brave, new world where innovation is everything. How can the fail fast mentality make tech innovation happen in the travel industry? It’s about lots of small experiments and imagining what the next iPhone of travel tech might be.

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Cyber threat: GPS spoofing

How vulnerable is the shipping industry to GPS spoofing? Is this the stuff of electronic warfare or could it impact non-military ships and cause chaos in shipping lanes? What is it and how do we reduce the risk? Well worth a read.

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AI on cruise ships

Royal Caribbean is using artificial intelligence to solve problems. From reducing the ‘friction’ of customer experience like using facial recognition technology to get new passengers ‘from car to bar’ in less than 10 minutes when checking in, rather than 90 minutes. AI also empowers decisions on food stocks to reduce waste.

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Are you fully engaged?

Probably not, according to a special HBR report on engagement around the world, following a survey of 19,000 workers. Only 16% of workers are fully engaged. It comes down to one thing. People who feel part of a team are more likely to be engaged.

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Leading the way on sustainability

Sustainability doesn’t have to be an expensive cost; it can also be a growth opportunity and a chance to engage with a new generation of travellers demanding sustainable options. With CLIA’s commitment to reduce carbon emissions across the industry fleet by 40% by 2030, we’ve got this. Here’s how.

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Walk the line

If you want a long-term sales strategy you need to know the difference between manipulation and persuasion. Brands who care about their customers understand that a good sale creates loyal customers who keep coming back for more.

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(Accidental) marathon man

Fitness trackers are inaccurately measuring distance, according to consumer watchdog, Which? During its trial of 118 trackers on a treadmill, least reliable underestimated the distance by 10.8 miles. Ouch. Be careful out there people.

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A wee dram of AI

Artificial Intelligence is creating whisky now through a collaboration between Microsoft, Finnish tech company, Fourkind and Swedish distillery Mackmyra Whisky. The distillery will feed existing recipes, sales data and customer preferences to machine learning models and see what recipes the AI suggests. Yikes.