In this year alone he's met legendary investor Warren Buffet, Facebook COO Sheryl Sanderberg, former US Defence Secretary and Huffington Post founder Arianna Huffington and just last week Chinese President Xi Jinping.
He's a big picture policy wonk as well as a leading chief executive - focused on New Zealand's competitive advantage as well as that of Air New Zealand.
But when it comes to the airline, Luxon singles out innovation as one of its long-term sources of competitive advantage.
The Herald talked to him about why he is so focused on innovation and why that is necessary to offset the disruptive forces that could also change the aviation industry,
The airline is riding high- why are you so focused on innovation?
I've gone back and reviewed the last 15 years of innovation at Air New Zealand, what's been core and incremental, adjacent, breakthrough - it's all different. A lot of it has been in response to new competitors. They've forced us to redo business models. You have to go through the lens of the customer and look at what customer problems you are trying to solve. Trying to avoid queues, which we know was a big issue for customers - was one.
Other companies we've talked with are facing big disruptive forces as a result of the digital age - what about Air New Zealand?
The big issue for me is that ultimately the industry will get disrupted. It's disrupt or be disrupted. If you look at what Google is now doing to banking, what Apple is doing to banking - those guys are scared like they've never been scared before. It was quite interesting seeing a bunch of bankers in America recently - they were absolutely petrified.
The reality for us is that our industry could get commoditised - it's a price, a logo, a destination and the challenges that go with that.
The one thing we're going to have to own is the customer. So if I look at the world of the digital retailer, I think that's a more superior model than how an airline model works today. So while in five years time, I think we're going to be an airline, I think our primacy will be about our relationship with the customer- and data, customer insight, and digital retailing - all of that - is going to be so important.
How hard is it to disrupt your business?
You have to have the courage to disrupt yourself. So, we had a big business with travel agents and bricks and mortar, and we've turned that now into online. You can now book your tickets through the web - 60 per cent of business comes that way.
Now we're going to disrupt that again- it's going to be on mobile. We want to drive all our R + D investment into mobile. All our technology and applications, because that's the future. And so if we don't do that, someone will do it to for us. We have to rip the business that we've built apart again and rebuild it.
Why are you so focused on "disrupt or be disrupted"?
In our case I know what needs to be disrupted, we need to move to a more sophisticated retail model rather than an airline model. That means we own the customer journey, we own the relationship with the customer and we commercialise it that way.
The way that Best Buy for instance - a bricks and mortar store - goes up against Amazon selling a fridge for US$1200. They'll price it dynamically throughout the course of the day on Amazon where in Best Buy it's pretty fixed. There's data that's driving that insight on how to commercialise throughout the course of the week.
You're also focused on making strategic alliances with airline partners - tell us more about that.
The big trend for me is collaboration. The last time we went to Singapore we lost $210 million doing that deal. You go - as a business guy - how the hell do you let that happen? That aside, this time we go to Singapore profitable on Day One.
In the airline industry - you always get three to five years to get profitable on a route - it's a $100 million decision. But you can lose $30 million a year very quickly. But we're collaborating and working on an alliance structure with Singapore Airlines. Not having to do it all on your own and being innovative in the process - not just the product and service delivery - is really important.
Who are the major players disrupting the airline industry?
I think it's a rubbish industry in that it's badly run, and it's not innovative. So you sit there and go, five years ago we ran something called the Sky Couch, has anyone tried to copy it? No. This is a good case of Kiwi innovation. We put it on five aircraft, we promote the hell out of it. We have 105 aircraft.
We have 25 international ones, so why isn't it on the other 20?
Until I came we hadn't even talked about licensing or IP. So now we've sold it to one airline, we've got two others in the pipeline. That to me is a classic Kiwi thing where we get very excited about innovation for innovation's sake and it's innovation junkie behaviour, and we haven't completed or converted it. You create innovation and then you roll it out around other countries and you get the scale benefits of that.
But having made all that investment for our own business which is very successful, we've got it on five aircraft. It needs to be on 25 - at least international aircraft.
