Nicholas Key missed his nephew’s Christmas play. On 20 December 2018, he was supposed to fly from Gatwick to Prague with his wife and two daughters. Drone sightings had closed the airport. The family eventually reached the Czech capital through Heathrow, almost six hours late, with extra flights and parking to pay for. The play had gone on without them.
For the co-founder of a company that helps airlines communicate during disruption, this was an unwelcome piece of fieldwork. He praised easyJet’s ground staff, who were working under enormous pressure. His criticism concerned the information: a delayed flight, a failed attempt to use the app’s disruption page, and too little clarity early enough to make different arrangements.
Key had helped build 15below around precisely this problem. A notification cannot reopen a runway. It can give somebody enough time to change plans. That morning made the distinction expensive, inconvenient and very difficult to explain to children looking forward to a family visit.
A career inside the booking machinery
Key came to the problem through travel technology. Before setting up 15below with John Clynes in 2000, he worked at SITA and American Express Travel. Those names place his early career inside the systems and services that keep journeys moving, well behind the departure board that passengers actually see.
His conference biography carries a less formal qualification: a “baggage loser” and “flight delay regular”. It is a useful introduction for somebody selling software to airlines. He knows the operational vocabulary, but he also knows the peculiar indignity of waiting for information that someone, somewhere, must surely possess.
The company’s name has a pleasingly practical explanation. It refers to a commitment to answer the telephone in fewer than 15 seconds. For a business concerned with responding quickly, it amounts to a tiny service agreement printed on the door. There are more glamorous ways to name a technology company. Very few come with a stopwatch.
In a November 2019 interview, Key described disruption communications as the business’s continuing “bread and butter”. The remit had widened to other parts of the journey, but the original test remained: when the schedule changes, can the airline reach the people whose plans have just changed with it?
The courtesy hidden in the software
Key’s description of personalisation often starts with details that would make a rather modest product launch. Send a non-urgent message at a reasonable hour. Convert a journey time into the traveller’s local time. Use the information already held in a booking to make the message useful to its recipient.
These are small courtesies with technical dependencies. The system needs the right data, a rule for when to use it, and a way to reach the passenger. A greeting containing somebody’s first name is easy to notice. A message that arrives at a sensible time is easy to take for granted. Key pays attention to the latter.
His argument also has a commercial side. An airline that answers a question before it is asked can spare its contact centre another call. He has pointed to JetBlue as an example of an airline treating relevant, proactive communication as a way to control costs. The traveller’s convenience and the operator’s workload are closely connected.
“Giving the human touch without manual intervention is always the ultimate goal”
Nicholas Key, 2020
The ambition sounds paradoxical until you consider the alternative: thousands of people asking the same question, with too few staff available to answer. Automation earns its place when it leaves those staff more time for the people whose circumstances require a conversation.
Getting the systems to talk
Key has pursued that idea through partnerships as well as product development. In July 2019, he announced a formal relationship with Amadeus, the travel technology provider. His letter concentrated on deeper integration, access to more data and improvements to the handling of booking records after a passenger has bought a ticket.
A booking record is an unromantic object to put at the centre of a customer experience. It is also where much of the necessary information lives. If a change in that record can trigger an appropriate message, the passenger need not discover the change by repeatedly checking a screen or calling an agent.
In June 2023, Key announced a strategic partnership with Navitaire, an Amadeus company. The relationship already had a long working history: 15below had supported carriers using Navitaire solutions since 2003. At the announcement, nearly a quarter of Navitaire’s customers were using 15below for passenger notifications.
Key’s proposed next steps were specific: joint development, closer connections between systems and more efficient airline workflows. For him, the partnership story is tied to the customer’s practical experience. Two suppliers have to exchange information successfully before one passenger can receive an answer that makes sense.
- 01A booking changesAirline systems hold the operational detail.
- 02A workflow respondsRules connect the change to the affected passenger.
- 03A traveller can actA relevant update makes the next step clearer.
Twenty-four years, then a new partner
In February 2024, 15below brought in private equity investor LDC. This was a new stage for a business founded almost a quarter-century earlier. LDC backed Key and the management team’s five-year growth strategy, including further development of the company’s own technology.
The scale at that moment helps explain the decision. The business supported more than 60 travel companies and employed more than 90 people across an international network. Its customers included British Airways, Cathay Pacific, Etihad and TUI. LDC said its technology communicated with one billion travellers a year.
From co-founding 15below in 2000 to partnering with LDC.
Key’s own announcement emphasised product development and the fit between the organisations’ attitudes to people and culture. Ian Wheeler, a former Amadeus executive, joined as chair. The arrangement put a new investor and additional industry experience around a founder who was continuing to lead the business.
Some meetings belong in a railway carriage
For a glimpse of Key’s idea of company culture, consider an earlier Brighton office project. The design included railway carriages used for meetings, places for work and play, and a feature spiral staircase. A travel company had apparently decided that even the journey between desks deserved some thought.
“purpose might be serious, but you can still have fun doing it,” Key said of the project. He wanted the workplace to express the company’s outlook. His satisfaction included a very practical observation: the redesigned space improved communication and movement around the office. The staircase had a job.
That taste for sociability also appears in his customer gatherings. Ahead of 15below’s eighth customer conference in 2026, he celebrated the chance to meet clients in Brighton and singled out Norwegian’s Edward Thorstad for attending all eight. He also expressed a hope that the rain would stay away. Even a disruption specialist is entitled to make that request.
The conversation comes back
In July 2025, 15below completed its first acquisition: Airport AI. The purchase brought Key together with Airport AI’s CEO Pierre Cuquemelle and CTO Filipe Pereira. Their business provided conversational software for airports, opening up a different side of the same traveller’s experience.
At the time, Airport AI served more than 80 airports. Its technology supported two-way conversations, while 15below brought long experience connecting to airline systems. The acquisition put those capabilities within one group. Key described the fit in terms of shared attention to airlines, airports and the passenger at the end of the process.
The distinction matters because travellers experience one journey while the industry divides responsibility among many organisations. An airline holds a reservation. An airport has information about the terminal. The passenger simply wants an answer. Bringing the relevant systems closer together is the work beneath Key’s ambition for a more connected trip.
There was a precedent in his thinking. Back in September 2019, 15below had announced a collaboration with OpenJaw to connect notifications to an automated conversation. Questions that the bot could not answer would pass to an airline representative. Key recognised then that even a well-designed alert could leave somebody needing more help.
Who gets the next question?
By June 2026, the airport side offered a concrete example. Brussels Airport won the Airport Innovation Award at the FTE Innovate Awards for BRUce, its conversational service developed with Airport AI. A recognised feature let passengers use image recognition to ask whether an item could travel in their baggage.
The published results included more than 500,000 passengers supported annually and 98% of enquiries resolved automatically. Key treated the award as evidence for a wider ambition: closer cooperation between airports and airlines through information, automation and self-service. A question about a bag is small enough to sound ordinary. Answering it reliably is precisely the point.
He also wants the industry to consider who carries the burden when things break. After Heathrow’s March 2025 closure, he challenged the expectation that airlines should absorb the financial and reputational impact of failures elsewhere in the supply chain. Twenty-three 15below airline customers operated at Heathrow; British Airways sent more than 120,000 platform notifications between midnight and 8am.
Key’s working life now spans those two kinds of conversation: the passenger asking what to do next, and the industry deciding how to make an answer possible. His family eventually reached Prague. Their nephew’s play could not be rescheduled around an airport closure. That remains a useful measure for all the software, partnerships and investment: information has to arrive while somebody can still use it.