"Navigating Through the Storm," a Joint Webinar of DataArt Travel Practice and Onepark

On the 26th of May 2020, DataArt and Onepark hosted a joint webinar entitled «Navigating through the Storm». Marcos Mauro, Head of DataArt Buenos Aires, moderated the discussion.

Cyril Guiraud, Chief Product Officer, and Gilles Latouche, Chief Executive Officer at Onepark, shared the experience of their organization navigating through the global storm. The company offers an online car park booking platform and a mobile app to compare, book and pay for a parking space, for instance, near an airport or in a city center. More than 2500 car parks, located in almost 300 cities in France, Spain, Belgium, and Switzerland, are available for Onepark app users. In January 2020, the company raised a €15 million round led by AccorHotels, one of the world’s leading hotel chains, with almost 4,700 hotels in 100 countries.

Cars are predicted to be one of the preferred mobility means in after-pandemic reality as people would probably feel uncomfortable using public transport, and airline travel would remain banned for a while. In all likelihood, after the pandemic, there would be a spike in domestic car rides; hence, the car parking sector is expected to recover at soonest.

Gilles Latouche shared his predictions concerning smart parking - digital seamless experience for drivers. In the future, though the parking spots would still be needed, the cars would park autonomously, without additional actions required from humans. The demand for digital contactless parking is already noticeable.

While safety is becoming the highest priority in traveling, Cyril Guiraud named the technologies to become trends for most large industry players:

• Contactless payments
• Touchless entry/ check-in/ check-out
• Schedule and crowd management software for large events and public venues
• Robotic process automation, including AI and VR
• Fraud mitigation applications

Max Zhdanov, VP of Travel & Hospitality Practice at DataArt, emphasized that the crisis would accelerate changes in the industry and in the whole world. The crisis is a driving force of innovation, and technology definitely plays a role in improving the products and helping companies adapt to the new reality. The speakers unanimously agreed the Technology helps companies to remain flexible and leverage expectations of the customers in the new normal.