I know, I know. Yet another article on AI. Believe me, I am as fed up with these as you, but bear with me a second, as I truly believe this is an important topic to be discussed. In short: AI is here. Whether you’ve used it to generate an image of a panda bear riding a bicycle on the moon, for work purposes, or read AI-generated text, chances are, you have already interacted with it many, many times.

Similarly, chances are, you are at least a bit familiar with airline processes. And of course, the airline industry is also subject to change, due to all these new AI practices.

In this article, we will focus on Airline Distribution, from the shopping, to the servicing of airline tickets. In other words, if you came here to read how AI is going to replace pilots, sorry, but you’re in the wrong place.

1. Selling, upselling and servicing through AI

Offer Generation

As with any new IT-based technology, the first focus for AI has been increasing sales. As such, AI is now being shoehorned into dynamic pricing and dynamic offer solutions, allowing for better, more granular customer segmentation and ensuring a more relevant offering to be presented to the end customer. Due to its massive power on data analytics, including customer preferences, booking history and market trends, airlines can dynamically adjust their shopping responses to better fit the requests, thus increasing conversion rates and total revenues. This approach also allows for more automation, making the airline’s fare filing more lean, allowing for fewer rules updates and less granular fare management.

Customer Care

Airlines intend to be more customer-centric. At least, that’s one of the main buzzwords we hear at the various conventions we attend. Part of this comes from the airline’s tailored offerings, as mentioned earlier, while next comes the handling of said customer. We all have wasted hours of our life, listening to a five-second music loop, waiting for a customer care agent to finally hear our complaints. Airlines intend to solve this by re-introducing chatbots, now AI-powered. These chatbots allow for guidance on the exchange or cancellation of tickets, ancillary sales and general questions an end user may have regarding their booking. Natural language processing is getting better and better, including multiple languages, allowing for airlines to serve a larger set of customers. One example of this approach is LivePerson, which already provides such capabilities for Azul Airlines, even allowing for upsell through a chatbot interface. Naturally, this does not remove the need for actual customer care agents, but allows for a “first filter”, replacing that oh-so-annoying music with actual discussion and letting agents focus on relevant use cases.

2. AI Agents

AI-ready API

More and more airlines nowadays provide an NDC API to interact with their content. AI agents are a new technology, capable of interacting with APIs. The first examples might seem small, such as being able to order an Uber by asking Gemini. These AI-based agents learn API interaction through various manners, one of which is machine-readable documentation. For a smoother integration, airlines should ensure all documentation is up-to-date with detailed examples, as these allow AI agents to be quickly trained and to interact with your NDC API.

Convin is one such example, offering voice-based search and flight reservations. But do not mistake voice recognition and AI: AI agents can also be triggered by text-based inputs, and chatbots are now being reinvented with AI to better understand requests and search through airline offerings.

3. The impact… Shopping volumes and OTA impact

Airlines have recently discovered what it means to be an API provider, through NDC. One of the constraints that come from offering APIs is that the airline is not always in control of API usage. In other terms, that dreaded look-to-book ratio is an important factor to consider when providing a shopping API to agencies and aggregators.

AI will now bring a new spin to this, as these AI agents will go through the web for every single search, greatly increasing costs associated with API management and, yes, look-to-book ratios.

The combination of airlines wanting to provide dynamic, tailored offerings, and AI agents scouring the web will result in an increase of look-to-book that few airlines are prepared for today.

While we are here focusing on the airline view of these AI agents, OTAs have been taking a close look at them as well. PhocusWire has a great article, presenting their risks for OTAs: https://www.phocuswire.com/ai-agents-future-of-online-travel-agency .

In short, the airline industry is now entering (willingly or not) a new era of distribution. AI agents scouring the web, looking for AI-created offerings and end-users being served by AI-based chatbots will soon become the norm, and, ironically all with the intent to become more customer-centric. Airlines that do not have AI-ready APIs may end up not integrating properly in AI agents’ search results, potentially leading to revenue loss through missed sales opportunities. And the ones that are not ready for the surge of search request created by these agents may see a huge increase in associated costs. So, airlines…

AI is here. Are you ready for it?

References and great reads on the subject:

• LivePerson, Take flight with AI: https://www.liveperson.com/blog/airline-digital-transformation/
• The New Stack , It’s time to start preparing APIs for the AI Agent Era: https://thenewstack.io/its-time-to-start-preparing-apis-for-the-ai-agent-era/
• Play, AI Agent APIs: A Comprehensive Guide: https://play.ht/blog/ai-agent-apis/
• Convin AI Voice Agents for Flight Search: https://convin.ai/blog/flight-ticket-booking-online
• Cognigy, AI Agents for Customer Service: https://www.cognigy.com/solutions/airlines-travel

 

Thibaud Rohmer, Travel in Motion AG

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

An important step towards a greener planet: Since 2023 Travel in Motion is operated in a CO2 balanced way. This means that our greenhouse gas emissions are reduced as much as possible and that we offset the remaining emissions with equivalent climate actions. We are only a very small organisation – however we travel a lot by air for our work with customers and partner. Therefore, also our contribution to stop climate change is important!

 

 

 

 

No doubt, commercial airline operations are going through one of the biggest evolutions in decades. Disintermediation continues to take place as traditional GDS-based distribution is increasingly replaced by distribution through new, often NDC-based, channels. In addition, customer-centric airline retailing is removing the legacy concept of trip-based commercial processes.

This leads to the replacement of well-established system environments such as Passenger Service Systems (PSS), which have been around for often thirty or forty years, by modern Offer and Order-based airline retailing platforms. These platforms are built on modern modular architectures, consisting of numerous single components. Therefore, the evolution of our industry is not only going through a path towards modern and customer-centric retailing, but also through a strategic path to substitute legacy, monolithic PSS by modern and modular systems.

In the upcoming world of Offers and Orders, airlines truly have the possibility to execute a “best of breed” approach when it comes to choosing components for their commercial IT landscape. In the traditional legacy PSS world, most of the commercial systems are provided by the PSS provider. Of course, there have always been individual components where solutions from highly specialised providers were used, such as Revenue Management or Revenue Accounting, but it is true to state that most of the commercial applications were provided by the PSS supplier. Therefore, airlines had little opportunity to bring together a solution environment that was provided by a heterogeneous vendor community. The need to integrate solutions was limited, business continuity was the job of a single supplier, and an airline CIO only (more or less) had to manage a single, albeit dominant IT partner. The legacy world was easy, but choice was limited.

Now we aim for a different paradigm. Modularity is key when it comes to Offer and Order-based commercial systems. Different components need to be integrated and work with systems often from competing suppliers, service levels need to be maintained in a multi-vendor set up, all based on an enterprise architecture which needs to be owned (or at least controlled) by the airline. However, this also leads to opportunities for airlines. Airlines can execute a real “best of breed” approach, choosing those systems and components that make most sense for them. The bespoke modular set up enables airlines to better differentiate and, in all consequences, also to provide “their flavour” to the customer experience. It is yet to be seen which airlines will make best use of this new freedom, as they individually need to balance complex, heterogeneous systems and the best individual set of solutions.

However, what does this mean for the IT vendor community? Until now the PSS market has been dominated by two major providers, Amadeus and Sabre (not considering Travelsky with their local dominance in mainland China). While this may be over-simplifying things a little, the commercial airline IT world could be separated into “Amadeus carriers”, “Sabre carriers” and “all others”. Providers of point solutions had to either integrate into the one or the other, if they were chosen over the PSS provider for a specific solution. Integration was often based on the APIs and other standards the PSS provider enforced.

And with Offer and Order management? Of course, on the vendor side of the equation, the big market players are aiming to provide a solution stack that covers all (or at least most) of the functionality an airline requires for their commercial operations. However, a lot of airlines are planning to make use of the new freedom of components and plan to choose solutions from different suppliers. This is driven by both a desire to break the transition into manageable chunks as well as constructing the ideal portfolio of solutions. Besides the complexity that the airlines need to handle for such a construct, the IT vendors also now need to re-think their interaction with their peers:

• Vendors need to become more open to collaborate with each other, including joint project planning and taking joint responsibility towards airline delivery.
• There is a difference between modularity and openness. A system environment provided by a single supplier can be modular but not open to third-party solutions. This applies not only to technical capabilities such as interfaces or open APIs, it also covers commercial terms. We have often experienced that the utilisation and integration of a third-party solution has been made commercially unfeasible by the main supplier, through extra (sometimes hidden) fees or other contractual terms such as weak service level agreements.
• IATA is defining the standards for Offer and Order management systems, but are they detailed enough for vendors to easily integrate on a module level?
• Airline first. Just as airlines are focusing on the customer, vendors should fundamentally shift their focus to serving the airline, even if this leads to some (short term) missed revenue opportunities. In the long run, airlines will most probably honour this, and it will be to the benefit of the vendor.

We will see over the next three to four years if modularity leads to openness and real airline-focused vendor cooperation. Or to put it differently, how will the new balance between “the winner (vendor) takes all” and “true collaboration in an open and modular world to best support airlines” play out? Whether you’re an airline, a vendor or just would like to explore this journey further, feel free to reach out to us!

 

 

This post has been published in collaboration with Terrapinn.

Boris Padovan, Travel in Motion AG

 

 

 

2024 has been an exciting year in airline distribution, with major developments for airlines and the travel tech industry.
Read Oystin‘s Distribution Insights 2024 to learn more about these developments and our take on upcoming trends.
Click here and download our comprehensive Distribution Insights 2024.


Our Distribution Insights contain:
– Our take on future trends
– The major airline developments in different regions of the world
– Deep-dives into American Airlines’ and Ryanair’s distribution strategies
– A comparison of GDS and their recovery since the pandemic
– A spotlight on the major tech providers, aggregators, and travel sellers

We hope you enjoy the Distribution Insights 2024, and we look forward to hearing your feedback. Wishing all a joyful holiday season and a great start to 2025.

The industry has made progress

Over the past years the airline industry has been working towards the concept of Offers and Orders to support the initiative referred to as Modern Airline Retailing. For the uninformed, there are plenty of articles and papers outlining both, so we won’t explain the two terms in this article.

Over the past two months, there have been three major industry conferences focusing on the airline commercial areas – retail, distribution, loyalty, payments, ancillaries and other related topics. What has become apparent is the progress which has been made in the last 12 to 24 months in these areas. Both the airlines and the solution providers are working towards the aim of business process re-engineering and moving in the direction of solutions which are more like ecommerce and digital retail solutions.

A perspective on how the domains will develop

While TiM uses its own solution capability blueprint with a somewhat more refined set of domains, for the sake of simplicity we will refer to the common four – Offer, Order, Settle and Deliver. The status of maturity of these domains varies considerably, with Offer being the most mature, followed by Order. Both Settle and Deliver are less developed, from both the perspective of vendor products as well as business process re-engineering. This gap is largely attributable to the flow of events in the retail, deliver, settle and fulfilment chain of events.

Looking into 2025 for each domain our expectation for each of them is as follows:

Offer – Airlines will continue to work towards higher offer maturity with a focus on dynamic offers – more specifically, dynamic and contiuous pricing. Increasing offer maturity is an “easy” revenue case to make, and there are plenty of solutions in the market. The vendors are enhancing their solutions in the same area, with some focusing additionally on segmentation and contextual selling as well as more advanced bundling capabilities. Another focus area in 2025 will certainly also be the Product Catalugue and the Stock Keeper.

Order – There are a handful of airlines experimenting with increasing the use of Orders. This is being driven either by airlines using a vendor which already supports components of the order, or their PSS vendor has built initial order structures independent from the PNR, ETKT and EMD as part of their roadmap. We use the term “experimenting” as there are no (full-service) airlines using the order fully yet, including servicing, feeding the order data to accounting and settlement flows, managing involuntary changes and doing journey management with it. The coming year will see an increase in maturity and the first airlines expanding the use of Order Management from a pure order storage to having the ability to work with the order.

Settle – In this domain, there are a number of very solid proof of concept implementatons with integration between Order Management Systems and Order Accounting solutions. The first airlines are testing the use of order accounting capabilities by not issuing EMDs for certain ancillaries. This simplification will help the Order Accounting vendors solidify their solutions and give the airlines the opportunity to learn new processes and truly identify the benefits, especially in terms of revenue leakage avoidance.

Deliver – In TiM’s opinion, this is the domain which will still require the most focus. The Deliver domain also has added complexity as it is closest to the airline’s operations and must work extremely reliably. Furthermore, there are potentially the largest number of other stakeholders which will influence this area – ground handlers, airport authorities, governments, biometric solution providers and many more. However, there are also a great number of opportunities here when we think ahead to the “touhchless airport” of the future, where dwell time is minimised or, for those who wish, dwell time is turned into a shopping, productive or relaxation experience as opposed to queues of people at check-in, security and immigration.

What are the vendors up to?

The logical answer may be that they are developing the solutions above. While this statement is indeed very true, the picture is not quite as straightforward as that. Various vendors are taking different approaches, with some having decided to go “all-in” and develop across the four domains (and beyond, in some cases). Others have decided that they are better focusing on a few key components (the ones they know best) and look for partners in others, building an ecosystem of like-minded solution providers. Others still have taken the risk of advancing into new areas, trying to expand to cover areas such as payment or the Deliver domain. In addition to this, we are still seeing a lot of new entrants, especially for niche or partial solutions. A lot of these new entrants focus on the use of artificial intelligence, especially in the pricing and revenue management domain.

While we think each vendor is unique and has business drivers and strategies guiding their direction, TiM believes that there must be a greater level of collaboration amongst the vendors. We understand the vendors compete with one another, and this must remain so. However, as an industry, we need to ensure that we don’t all run in different directions when building out new capabilities or components. How such an alignment between vendors, for example to agree on intra-component interfaces would look, is food for thought for us and the vendor community.

TiM’s Take

The journey to Offers and Orders is a long one, and we may well publish outlook articles like this for a few years to come. While not all areas are progressing at the same speed, we do not feel that is currently an issue. Most airlines that we work with directly or are discussing the transition with are taking a step-by-step approach. Typically, airlines start with some component of Offer as this is where it is easiest to demonstrate value, and most solutions are available. Offer enhancements are then followed by Order, often to enable even more progress on the Offer side. With a base level of Order competence in place, the airlines will then start considering both the Settle and Service Delivery domains. This is very much in line with the maturity scale, and we can assume that the maturity of the different domains has been driven by customer needs – meaning the airlines’ needs and requests to the vendors.

For airlines who have not yet started at all but would like to get familiar with Offers and Orders, we are more than happy to offer our two-day primer – an onsite training session covering all the basic understanding necessary, including risks, challenges, guidance on how to define a business case, future-state scenarios, the state of the industry and finally, how a transition could be planned.

Daniel Friedli, Travel in Motion AG

 

The airline industry has started moving from legacy Passenger Service System (PSS) focused commercial IT operations to a customer-centric offer and order-based retailing environment. Through our engagements, we know that this is a complex undertaking involving internal airline departments, traditional distribution entities and partner airlines, just to name a few stakeholders, often with conflicting interests and agendas. And, of course, IT plays an important role here and is often a key entity when it comes to decision making.

Sometimes it is not very explicit that the migration to offer and order also manifests a fundamental change in IT architecture: from monolithic environments to a modular set up, from functions to services, from legacy IT to modern architecture and from classical hosting in dedicated data centers to cloud-based IT operations.

When I started my career in airline IT, running a PSS host was the highlight of every data center operation. The Swissair data center was the core of its airline IT and the pride of most of Swissair’s IT staff. The (at the time mostly) guys running it were some of the most reputable individuals in the IT department of the company, sometimes quite similar to the cast of pilots in the flying part of the airline.

However, the current evolution to offer and order is also core to triggering or accelerating the move to a cloud-based IT environment. The advantages of the cloud are widely known, such as scalability to grow and “breathe” with volatile market requirements, highest availability of services combined with a latency that is now negligible, all operated in a highly secure environment and driven by continuous improvement processes. These advantages also come with an relative overall reduction in CO₂ emissions when compared to the on-premise hosting model. Of course, big cloud data centers create large amounts of CO₂ as well, but it is generally accepted that the overall volume is lower than having the same computing power operated out of numerous smaller entities. Therefore, the need for an airline to operate a dedicated data center has vanished. The head of IT does not need to keep the data center secure and alive by “refreshing” it every three to five years to e.g., avoid security issues. This has also enabled the evolution of company IT leadership. The role of a head of IT or CIO has evolved into a role that drives enterprise-wide innovation by making an airline digital and customer focused.

However, moving to the cloud is more than optimizing IT operations. It is also a key element of the commercial transformation of an airline, because it can only become a true retailer if its IT system and application landscape enable this fundamental change. Both transformations, the “IT infrastructure” and the “commercial” one need to go hand in hand. The move to offer and order management is a particularly critical factor if this dual transformation: the airline becomes a retailer through its cloud based commercial IT systems.

Both transformations will not happen without initial efforts of finance, resources and management. They resemble the famous hockey stick picture – there is a lot of investment before the gains can be realized. However, the gains may come in earlier and at an increased rate, if a voyage is chosen where leveraging early commercial benefits might flatten (though probably not fully compensate) the required IT investments. Therefore, a business case should take this into consideration and frame the sequence of the transformation activities. We will probably not reach a scenario where the revenue increase of becoming a retailer will immediately pay for the IT transformation in full, but it may be able to contribute a lot, particularly in the early stages. This proves again that it can be very beneficial to look into the transformation from a holistic view, taking both the commercial and technological aspects into consideration.

The major vendors of airline offer and order management platforms and the big cloud providers manifest these interdependencies in their own partnership strategies. The three big cloud providers (Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud) are very active in the airline IT sector, especially in the offer and order management segment. They all not only have airline clients, but they also support major airline IT providers: AWS, who seems to be the biggest player in this area, works closely Accelya and IBS, Microsoft has a strong collaboration with Amadeus and PROS in place and Google works closely with Sabre – just to name a few publicly-known partnerships.

Will we ever reach cloud nine, as it is the place we want to be? Transforming an airline’s commercial and IT landscape is full of challenges, while fully making optimal use of it is an ongoing effort. But both challenges should be addressed jointly, and airlines should not sell themselves short by only considering the transition to offer and order or only looking at the IT cloud transformation. They should go hand in hand, based on an overall transformation strategy. Both paths need to be taken simultaneously and interdependently to reach ONE cloud nine – being a fully retailing airline driven by a cloud-based infrastructure.

This post has been published in collaboration with Terrapinn.

Boris Padovan, Travel in Motion AG

 

 

 

Our society is made of rankings

“Five stars”. “Recommended”. “Best hidden gem”. In today’s digital age, we tend to rank everything and refer to these ranks multiple times a day. From restaurants to gadgets, we are constantly bombarded with lists and reviews that claim to identify “the best”. I am no stranger to it, and while travelling, I often find myself searching for the best places to take photos, eat, etc. Ultimately, no matter how specific the search, I can be sure to find a large set of lists, all assuring me that they know exactly which one will suit me best. This phenomenon has created a self-enforcing loop of always wanting to select the best option available, whether it is for personal or professional use.

As a consultant in the airline retailing industry, I am frequently asked questions like “what is the best solution?”, “what is the best company?” or “what is the best approach?”. While these seem like straightforward questions, the reality is far more complex. The definition of “the best” varies significantly depending on the client’s unique needs, goals and circumstances. What works perfectly for one client might not be suitable for another, making it impossible to pinpoint a one-size-fits-all answer.

For instance, we have been looking at potential solutions for payment orchestration for airlines. One could think that the best Payment Orchestration Provider (POP) would be the one that supports the largest set of payment methods across the world, along with related features like fraud screening. However, looking at the actual markets where the airline operates made it clear that the relevance of some of those payment methods were entirely irrelevant. In other words, if your main markets are the US and Europe, you probably do not care about payment methods specific to Asia (and vice-versa).

The ”it depends” problem

So, how can we tackle this tricky question of “the best” and come up with a better answer than the laconic (and quite unhelpful) “it depends”?

In our view, the first step, before even looking at potential solutions to the question, is to properly define what “the best” truly means. To navigate this complexity, we can focus on three main criteria: cost, features, and timing.

1. Features: This criteria is often the first one that comes to mind when defining “the best”. The more feature-complete a product is and the more capabilities a solution brings to the table, the easier it is to get a clear definition of “best in class”. As a result, such a consideration is the most common approach to start contemplating a particular solution or product. But as indicated above, these features then need to be evaluated for their relevance and criticality. Therefore, listing these features is one thing, but prioritising them is even more important.
2. Cost: This is often the most important concern for airlines, and is usually in direct opposition to the “features-complete” argument. In short, the best option must fit within the budget constraints while still delivering value. Defining costs when evaluating approaches may be tricky, as it requires a thorough understanding of not only the implementation and operation costs, but also the potential reduction in costs due to the new solutions being implemented.
3. Timing/Quality: Lastly, the airline needs to clarify where it stands on the “time versus quality” scale. In the fast-paced airline industry, delays can lead to significant losses, making time a critical factor. However, any issue in a system is also a source of losses and reduced trust. Therefore, the best solution is often one that can meet tight deadlines with minimal compromises on quality, and airlines need to evaluate how much compromise they are willing to accept.

Once the airline has clear priorities on its requirements and a view on what truly matters when evaluating the solution, only then can we start looking at the solution. Depending on the topic, the airline may simply do an internal evaluation or start some heavier process, like running an RFP and thoroughly evaluating different approaches through detailed documentation and discussions. Then again, while these are useful means to evaluate solutions to a given problem, they may lead to the wrong conclusion without a rigorous definition of the airline’s priorities as a very first step.

Conclusion

To summarise, determining “the best” first requires a thorough evaluation of one’s priorities and specific requirements. It’s essential to move beyond the superficial allure of rankings and reviews and delve into what truly matters for your project, with regards to your own company. By carefully considering how relevant cost, features, quality and timing are for your project, you can make a more informed decision that aligns with your unique needs and goals. Remember, “the best” is not a universal constant but a variable that changes with context and perspective. At Travel in Motion, we will happily help you get clarity on these requirements, and walk with you on this evaluation journey, guiding you to finally answer: what is the best, for you.

 

Thibaud Rohmer, Travel in Motion AG

 

 

 

 

We are proud to launch TiM Academy! TiM Academy is an online self-learning platform which covers topics related to commercial aviation. It is structured by curriculum, such as General Introduction to Civil Aviation, Airline Commercial Processes, Airline Distribution, NDC, Offer and Order Management, Revenue Management or Airline Commercial Systems. The number of curriculums keeps growing covering many different aviation domains. Each curriculum consists of courses that are made up by short modules. These modules are designed to provide a new self-learning experience with a duration of 10 to 15 minutes each.

• In the B2C environment, anyone can subscribe to individual courses and modules with a simple pricing and payment mechanism.
• For the B2B environment, we will setup your individual company learning space where you can manage users, TiM content and even your own content, and where we can hold blended learning sessions by expanding the online courses with webinars.

By structuring the TiM Academy content into digestible pieces we enable a flexible learning experience where you or your colleagues can learn at an individual pace. From a corporate learning and development perspective, trainings can be assigned to individuals and measured, and results be reported.

We are also very proud that we could engage some of the leading experts for TiM Academy. With this we ensure that each curriculum provides the depth for a perfect understanding, and that they are continuously kept up to date to reflect the pace of the industry evolution.

Are you interested in trying TiM Academy for free and with it a chance to win an iPad?

Sign up for free modules of the to TiM Academy here

and enjoy the new way of step-by-step learning, regardless of if you are new to our industry or if you want to stay aligned with the latest airline developments.

We are looking forward to welcoming you to TiM Academy, because knowledge makes the difference: create it – maintain it – grow it!

 

 

The road to Offer and Order: Airlines are making progress, as many have begun to tackle the design stage and IATA is providing support to help airlines resolve common issues.

If this is such a long and complex programme with incomplete standards and systems not yet fully designed, one could ask why even engage on such a long and arduous change programme.

Read our latest whitepaper about Offer and Order in 2025 and beyond, kindly supported by PROS.

DOWNLOAD THE WHITEPAPER HERE

Transitioning from one industry to another is never a straightforward path. It’s a journey filled with challenges, learning curves, and unexpected thrills. Coming from a finance background, I’ve spent years crunching numbers, analysing data, and making strategic decisions based on financial reports. The world of finance is intricate, logical, and, for the most part, predictable. When I decided to shift gears and enter the airline industry, I knew I was in for a whirlwind of change. What I didn’t expect was how exhilarating the ride would be.

The airline industry is a vast, dynamic ecosystem that operates on a global scale. It’s a world where customer experience, technology and operational efficiency converge. This industry is unlike any other, with its own set of rules, challenges and opportunities. Coming from a finance background, I had always associated creativity with fields like marketing, design or the arts. My previous work was heavily rooted in data analysis which is, frankly, not very creative. However, one of the most surprising aspects of transitioning into the airline industry has been discovering just how much creative thinking is required to succeed here in a way to find the best solution for the specific airline and find a way how to present it to the client in organised, yet engaging, manner.

One of the first things I realised was the sheer complexity of the industry. In finance, while complex, the systems are often centralised and standardised. The airline industry, on the other hand, is a patchwork of legacy systems, new technologies and industry standards that need to work together seamlessly. In addition, working with legacy systems alongside cutting-edge technology often involves creative problem-solving. Finding ways to integrate new solutions with existing infrastructure, or designing workarounds that maintain operational continuity, is as much an art as it is a science. This blend of creativity and technical skill is something that makes the work here incredibly rewarding. 

One of the first challenges I encountered was familiarising myself with the plethora of acronyms that dominate the airline industry. Terms like NDC, GDS, PSS, PNR and DCS were thrown around in meetings, leaving me scrambling to catch up. Many airlines still rely on decades-old systems for their core operations. As someone used to the fast-paced, ever-evolving world of finance technology, adapting to the slower pace of change in airline IT systems was a lesson in patience and understanding the importance of stability in operations.

The airline industry is moving towards a retail-oriented approach, where the traditional fare-based system is being replaced by a more flexible Offer and Order system. It’s exciting to be part of an industry at the cusp of such a significant change.

The People Make the Difference

While the technical aspects of the airline industry are fascinating, it is the people who make the transition truly unique. I have been fortunate to work with colleagues who are not only experts in their fields, but also incredibly supportive.

The airline industry is very collaborative and team oriented. My colleagues have gone above and beyond to help me get up to speed. They’ve patiently explained complex concepts, answered my endless questions, and provided guidance without overwhelming me with unnecessary details. It is also very helpful that each one of them comes with different knowledge and experience from different areas of the industry, which gives me insight into a wider scope of topics and insights.

This willingness to share knowledge and support newcomers is something I’ve come to deeply appreciate. It’s not just about getting the job done; it’s about bringing everyone along on the journey. This culture of mentorship and collaboration is something I’ve found to be highly emphasised in the airline industry.

Many conferences that the industry offers are a goldmine for anyone new to the industry. Networking at these events is instrumental in understanding the bigger picture of how the industry operates. Even though my first attendance at a conference is yet to happen, I am very much looking forward to engaging with professionals who have spent decades in the industry to provide me with insights that no textbook or online course could offer. These conferences highlight the importance of collaboration in the industry. Unlike finance, where competition can be cutthroat, the airline industry thrives on partnerships – be it between airlines, technology providers or regulatory bodies.

The Perks of Travel: Fuel for Personal and Professional Growth

Another delightful aspect of working in the airline industry is the travel opportunities. Of course, I knew travel would be part of the job, but I underestimated just how enriching it would be – not just professionally, but also personally.

Professionally, travelling has allowed me to experience at first hand the complexities of global operations. Visiting different clients, meeting with international colleagues and understanding the unique challenges faced by airlines in various regions have given me a broader perspective on the industry. It’s one thing to discuss global operations in a conference room, it’s another to be on the ground, seeing how things work in different parts of the world. This hands-on experience has deepened my understanding of the industry and improved my ability to contribute meaningfully to projects and strategies.

On a personal level, the travel opportunities have been equally enriching. Visiting new cities, experiencing different cultures and meeting people from all walks of life have broadened my horizons in ways I hadn’t anticipated. Travel has always been a passion of mine, but working in the airline industry has taken it to another level. It’s not just about ticking destinations off a list, it’s about truly engaging with the world and growing as an individual. The travel perks of working in the airline industry are more than just a benefit – they’re an integral part of the job that fuels both personal and professional development.

Conclusion

Transitioning to the airline industry has been an exhilarating and transformative experience, far beyond what I ever imagined. The industry’s complexity, coupled with the surprising need for creative problem-solving has challenged me in new and exciting ways. The supportive, collaborative environment has made the learning curve manageable, while the opportunity to travel has enriched both my personal and professional life. Ultimately, working in the airline industry is a thrilling adventure — one that continuously pushes me to grow, adapt and embrace the ever-changing landscape of global aviation.

 

This post has been published in collaboration with Terrapinn.

Leila Rešidbegović, Travel in Motion AG