Latest news with #ATPCO
Travel Weekly
05-06-2025
- Business
- Travel Weekly
Alex Zoghlin is leaving ATPCO
Airfare technology company ATPCO said CEO Alex Zoghlin is stepping down to "pursue a new professional opportunity, to be announced soon." Alex Zoghlin ATPCO praised Zoghlin, saying he is departing "after five years of transformative leadership, during which he championed innovation, advanced standards in airline pricing and strengthened the company's role as a neutral partner driving the industry forward." CFO Vince Palmiere will be appointed interim CEO while ATPCO's board begins a CEO search. Zoghlin said, "Leading ATPCO has been one of the greatest honors of my career. I am incredibly proud of the work our team has accomplished together, and I deeply believe in ATPCO's mission to enable smarter, faster, and more accurate travel offers across the airline industry, while the industry exists between filed fares and dynamic offers. Although it's time for me to take on a new challenge, I will always be a supporter of ATPCO and the important role it plays in aviation." Zoghlin was the first employee at Orbitz, serving as chief technology officer when the OTA was founded in 2001. Later in the decade, he founded G2 SwitchWorks, an alternative GDS whose assets were eventually acquired by Travelport.
Travel Daily News
07-05-2025
- Business
- Travel Daily News
ATPCO and Renacen bring virtual tours to flight shopping
ATPCO partners with Renacen to offer 3D Virtual Tours, enhancing flight shopping with immersive cabin visuals and boosting seat merchandising. ATPCO has announced a new partnership with 3D SeatMapVR by Renacen, the travel industry's leader in 3D seat map technology, that brings an immersive shopping experience to life via interactive virtual tours. This collaboration will provide travelers an unprecedented look inside an aircraft during the booking process, arming consumers with more insight into the type of seat, its features, and the layout a particular aircraft offers. Virtual Tours, the newest in Routehappy Visuals, is now available to all Routehappy airline subscribers who also subscribe to Renacen. This partnership enables Virtual Tours to be seamlessly integrated and distributed to any channel subscribed to ATPCO's Routehappy. ATPCO also enables Virtual Tours for airlines working with their own 360-degree content providers, offering full flexibility to use the partner of their choice. Corporate booking tool AmTrav, part of the TravelPerk Group, is the first sales channel to integrate the content and offer this innovative display and enhanced visualization to its users. 'Virtual Tours represent a major leap in airline merchandising, transforming how consumers shop for flights,' said Thomas Gregorson, ATPCO's Chief Strategy Officer. Through collaboration with innovative companies like Renacen and early adopters like AmTrav, travelers can now interact with and explore cabins and seating arrangements before making their purchase. Not only do Routehappy Visuals enhance traveler confidence, but they also enable airlines and sales channels to deliver a more engaging shopping experience while boosting ancillary revenue opportunities such as seat and cabin upgrades.' AmTrav's Routehappy integration already includes Renacen's Virtual Tours for Gulf Air, Iberia, Iberia Express, Hawaiian Airlines' 787s, most United Airlines flights, and Delta Air Lines' Airbus A330-900neo and A321 aircraft. Additional airlines and aircraft types are set to be added soon. 'Savvy travelers are obsessed with where they sit on a plane,' said Jeff Klee, CEO of AmTrav. 'At AmTrav, we want to make sure we equip those travelers with enough information to understand which option will be the most comfortable so they can make the most well-informed decisions. To that end, Virtual Tours are an absolute game-changer, giving travelers amazing visibility into what they'll experience. Routehappy continues to be one of the most positive forces for good in airline retailing.' Renacen CEO Diego de Alcalá Cachero Rodríguez added, 'Airlines have increasingly complex seating offers that have historically been difficult for consumers to visualize. Our technology has allowed flight shoppers on airline websites to see exactly what they will pay for during the seat selection process for some time, and our partnership with ATPCO will expand that reach, which means more airlines, sales channels and consumers will have access to best-in-kind cabin tours.' In 2024, ATPCO's shopper survey revealed that 83% of flight shoppers prefer 360-degree cabin tours when selecting a seat or cabin. As consumer expectations for interactive and visually engaging content continue to rise, Virtual Tours positions ATPCO and its partners at the forefront of modern airline retailing. The introduction of Virtual Tours supports ATPCO's focus on improving an airline's ability to merchandise seats and our ongoing commitment to innovation in airline merchandising. Virtual Tours reduces the burdens on airlines by utilizing existing content partnerships and eliminating the need to create and maintain their own immersive visuals. Sales channels benefit from consistent, high-quality content that enhances platform engagement, while flight shoppers gain the confidence to make informed booking decisions. This is the first phase of collaboration with Renacen to explore the value of Virtual Tours within the complete customer journey. ATPCO is actively collaborating with additional sales channels and airlines to unveil more tours in the coming months, expanding the reach and impact of Virtual Tours.
Axios
09-03-2025
- Business
- Axios
CEOs "shoving" AI "into everything" — with mixed results
Companies across corporate America are experimenting with generative AI to see if it can make them better, smarter and more productive — with mixed success. Why it matters: C-suite AI proponents have been pushing a "use it or get left behind" mentality, but it's often up to the rank and file to figure out how to actually implement AI in their day-to-day work. What we're hearing: AI is helping workers offload time-consuming menial tasks, and it's handling some complex work better than humans. Jason Rabinowitz, head of content creation at airline retailing firm ATPCO, told Axios that days of translating airline marketing content has been reduced to "about two hours" with AI's help in handling complex workflows and multiple spreadsheets. Rabinowitz also described pitting AI-translated materials against human-translated versions in a "blind trial" — and finding that, so far, the AI-translated versions are "more readable and more accurate." Reality check: Generative AI models suffer from "hallucinations" — techspeak for making stuff up. AI's work needs to be checked, and that process is sometimes more time-consuming than not using AI at all. And there remains the perennial concern among workers that generative AI will take people's jobs (with AI proponents countering that, like past disruptive technologies, it will create new, unforeseen jobs). By the numbers: About 1 in 6 U.S. workers say they're using AI to do at least some of their work, per a recent Pew survey, while another 25% say AI could do at least part of their jobs. 52% of workers are worried about AI's impact, while 32% say it'll reduce job opportunities. Yet 36% say they're optimistic about AI's potential. The big picture: AI's value comes down to how it's used, says Alexia Cambon, senior director of research at Microsoft. (Microsoft is a major investor in ChatGPT maker OpenAI and runs a GenAI chatbot called Copilot.) "There's a command-based approach, where you look at AI and you think, 'AI has to obey me — I'm going to give it a really simple prompt, and it has to do what I want it to,'" Cambon says. "And then there's the conversation-based approach, which is ... 'I'm going to use it as a thought partner, and I'm going to use it to brainstorm' — and that requires a lot of critical thinking, and that is the preferable way to use AI in a work context." The other side: Ed Zitron, CEO of PR agency EZPR and prominent AI skeptic, argues that many corporate leaders are pushing AI despite being too disconnected from their companies' day-to-day work to understand its actual use. "What I think we're seeing is the biggest mask-off in corporate history, of bosses that do not know what they're talking about, that do not touch their businesses, shoving ChatGPT and other generative AI into everything because they don't know how anything works," Zitron says. What's next: Generative AI proponents will tell you that the technology remains in its infancy and whatever comes next will be more capable. The jury's out on whether that's true — hallucinations are an especially sticky problem. But for anyone with an "email job," it couldn't hurt to at least start experimenting with AI to see what it can do for you — and what it can't. Disclosure: Axios and OpenAI have a licensing and technology agreement that allows OpenAI to access part of Axios' story archives while helping fund the launch of Axios in four local cities and providing some AI tools. Axios has editorial independence.
