Product Vision: The CitizenPlane Story So Far

This article was originally published on LinkedIn https://shorturl.at/q2DdG

By Hadrien Musitelli, CEO, CitizenPlane

When you are not an airline - how do you sell seats online? That was the challenge we looked to solve when we started CitizenPlane. We wanted to take complex industry thinking and make it simple. 

Our initial focus was on tour operators. Now, we do it for airlines too. With CitizenPlane, airlines can start pushing flights online in less than 5 minutes compared to the months it takes to distribute via the GDS integration. And now we do a lot more.

Our story started in 2017. We built a small external inventory tool for tour operators where they can create flights, in putting their price and availability. Then we connected this API to all major online travel agencies (OTAs) and online distributors. We had good product-market fit. Development was very fast, and in just a couple of years we were present in more than 100 countries, and we had more than 1,000 suppliers using our platform. It was then that we had to make a big decision. What next?

We were at the border between distribution and inventory, and quickly realized that we could make something else. We had to decide to go down the distribution side or play more in the inventory-side of the business. We soon realized that the real value is in inventory. You don’t have the interdependencies on partners, like you do with distribution.  Your client is the airline, and that is it. It’s a more straightforward business model. 

Importantly, the industry is also hungry for innovation. There are a lot of big players investing big money, but many have been around for more than 25 years. Industry complexity and legacy have made it a hard market for newcomers to enter. That has created a build-up of demand for transformation and fresh thinking. 

To meet that need, we imagined an airline operating system - a one-stop shop solution where carriers, especially smaller airlines, can manage everything they need to run their business. The idea is to have a suite of interoperable modules to offer our airline customers. You can start with one module, like the distribution module, Air, for example, and then you can use the Offer & Order module, the Deliver module (DCS), revenue management and so on. To fast-track our go-to-market strategy, we decided not to build from scratch. In 2024, we acquired TTI and the Zenith PSS is now one of the foundations of our operating system concept. 

If you work in the airline industry, you’ve probably heard terminology like “Modern Airline Retailing” or“OOSD.” For me, they mean the same thing: it’s time to innovate - to get rid of legacy and inflexible systems and generate new revenue streams for airlines.  

Having Zenith is important as the industry heads toward modern airline retailing and OOSD transformation.Systems will need to be compatible as we bridge the old PSS world and the newOOSD world. We will need to have the two protocols in parallel for many years.But at CitizenPlane, we are more than foundations and bridges; it's about bringing product visionas we reimagine airline IT.

Things like legacy-free technology, easy-to-use tools, API-centric modularity, microservices over monoliths - these are the principles that will unlock some new revenue for our airline customers. They are principles at the core of our product development - and you can see them in our distribution tool, Air. 

We are fortunate to have the TTI / Zenith team with 25 years of existing industry knowledge in the company. We have many engineers who are experts in the domain and all the legacy tools you need if you want to work with airlines in the current world. 

At the moment, it's quite challenging because we have two different roadmaps. We have the up-and-running roadmap because we need to serve all our existing clients. And we have the new operating system roadmap.  We are hiring and creating cross-team squads to accelerate work on new OS projects. 

One of our advantages is that we have more than 50 live and up-and-running customers. It doesn’t matter that they are small airlines - that’s how we started CitizenPlane at the beginning. We started with very small travel agencies, and now we work with big airlines on the distribution-side of our business. So that's exactly what we want to replicate with the airline OS. We want to start with carriers with less than 10 million passengers boarded, and we will go bigger and bigger year-after-year.

It's very important for us not to start building a new product only with one airline, because you end up building a lot of tools and capabilities only for this one company and you don't really know if these tools will be used and valued by others. Not having a product mindset is how the PSS-world has become so complicated. Developers built out customer requests year after year until it became too difficult to modernise.

Over the last 12 months, I am most proud of the successful integration work we have done with the TTI / Zenith team. As it was our first acquisition, merging  the teams was a complex and challenging project, but now we have fully come together. The knowledge we get from TTI / Zenith mixed with the native AI-innovators team coming from CitizenPlane is a powerful combination. 

Over the next year, we will continue developing new tools on the existing Zenith PSS in order to be able to onboard more airlines and bigger airlines. So you can expect more tools and more connectivity on the actual PSS. We will also be maturing the new operating system concept, and I look forward to showing you an early look at it within the coming months.

We think that we have a real opportunity because the sector is booming, because we have everything in-house, because we are a profitable company. It will help us a lot as we mature our operating system concept and bring our product vision to life. Follow us at CitizenPlane and follow our story as it unfolds.