Aviation as an industry has invested trillions in airports, aircraft, cabins, distribution and all the associated systems to make travel easy. The system normally works and everything is fit for purpose. Yet despite the oodles of cash poured in, the travel experience can remain stressful and unsatisfying for passengers.

Imagine you are buying lunch, dinner, a night in a hotel and breakfast. Spend a thousand Dollars on that bundle on the ground and it would be terrific. Spend five thousand Dollars and it would be the most amazing time imaginable, one you would remember for the rest of your life.

Yet in the air the same money buys indifferent service, acceptable food and, if you are lucky, a small and pokey bed with a pillow that is somehow not quite right.

There are real limits to passenger experience. Hurtling through the air in a pressurised tube at close to the speed of sound will never be conducive to a good night’s sleep.

But customers can be more forgiving if the human element of the service is great. Friendly and personable staff who turn up the charm or the banter when they judge it will do well. Or keep things formal when they reckon it will not.

Staff who say things like “I thought you’d like two” when handing out wine or beer to their good humoured passengers. Staff who are not robots. No corporate policy can mandate such behaviours. But the right environment can make these things happen naturally.

In today’s article I am going to make the case that optimising the staff experience is one of the missing ingredients that airports and airlines can do to make life easier for their passengers, and earn more revenue while they do it.

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For the next two weeks I am on holiday. One more article this week, coming tomorrow Friday. Airline Revenue Economics will return on Monday 13th April.

Airport and airline staff need to be free to play to their strengths

Building a culture where staff are free to surprise and delight their passengers is not easy for an airline. Cabin and ground services are dominated by processes and manuals.

Only a few airports and airlines have managed it.

Consider living legend Josh on my Virgin Atlantic flight to San Francisco last year.

I knew I was in for a remarkable flight when Josh welcomed me at the aircraft door with his perfectly manicured moustache and immaculately tailored lady’s uniform. Luckily, Josh was serving my section of the plane and he did not disappoint.

There must have been thousands of airline crew and ground staff I have met over the years. I remember almost none of them. But I will never forget Josh.

Building a culture where people like Josh can thrive may be hard. It is certainly, however, desirable.

Airports and airlines that get it right will find their passengers telling their friends and chattering about how great their trip was on social media. That boosts aggregate demand and so revenue.

Staff culture and experience is not limited to the customer facing parts of the business either. Think of all the money airports and airlines you know have spent on commercial or technical “transformation” projects with oceans of ink used to print millions of slides.

Almost none of that was spent on people who work there, which always has been and always will be the key element in successful transformation.

Not everybody needs to be a charismatic and extroverted outlier like Josh. But they should be free to express the unique advantages of their particular personality in delivering service, revenue optimisation, sales or whatever other role they have.

Take Nishantha at Qatar Airways for example.

A larger than life character, Nishantha’s official role back when I was there was in the demand forecasting team. His unofficial, more important role, was the person who made sure that whenever somebody came back from holiday they bought a food or drink from their home country to share with the team.

We had more than 100 staff and 20 nationalities in Revenue Management at the time. Nishantha’s efforts delivered a constant stream of delicious tidbits into the pantry. Without Nishantha, the team would have been diminished. Without Nishantha Qatar Airways would have earned less revenue.

Heathrow helps staff solve passengers problems with a staff app

At London’s Heathrow airport, operations normally run smoothly. In January 2026, escalators and lifts in Terminal 5 were available 99.34% of the time. Baggage system delivery of luggage to the make up area within 30 minutes of departure at Terminal 2 was 98.32%.

But like all well run airports and airlines, Heathrow recognise that while running things smoothly is important, putting things right when they have gone wrong is the key to success when it comes to passenger experience.

While technology can identify problems, people are needed to solve them. Using technology to help people address the thorniest challenges can be more powerful in a tricky operating environment than powerful AI-powered technical platforms.

Especially considering that no human uses complex technology in exactly the way it has been designed.

The technology also needs to be used in a way which is embedded in the working environment, not just delivered sporadically, like an annual training session.

Accordingly all Heathrow staff have access to a staff app. It is intended to allow any member of staff to answer any passenger’s question at any time.

The staff app encourages staff to interact with passengers because they know they are likely to have the information they need at their fingertips. It helps create a culture where staff want to help.

It also ensures that Heathrow’s operation is not at the mercy of whether or not the “right” staff just happened to be rostered for work that day. With the app, every member of staff can help every passenger.

Above all, it makes things easier for staff to do their jobs and helps passengers proceed through the airport with confidence.

All airports should emulate Heathrow’s staff app.

A quick win for airlines and airports

What if your staff felt as loyal as your top-tier flyers?

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A recent job ad from British Airways gives some interesting clues about how the airline might see the future of loyalty.

The airline is looking for a new “Loyalty Manager”. It appeared on my LinkedIn feed and has been discussed on both leading blog Head for Points and fizzy bulletin board FlyerTalk.

Although it looks great, I won’t be applying as if successful I would have to give up being your favourite airline revenue economist. You can apply if you visit the BA careers portal before 9-Sep-2025.

In this article I take a look at the job description step by step and pick out the interesting points. I will attempt to answer five questions:

Q1. Is the new Loyalty Manager going to be running the whole Loyalty show at BA?

Q2. To what extent does the ad suggest BA wants to develop it’s The Club programme or leave it as it is?

Q3. Are there any red flags in the job description?

Q4. What would I do if I had this job?

Q5. How much money will the new Loyalty Manager earn?

Today is my airline industry Date of Joining anniversary – 18 years ago on 1-Sep-2007 I boarded Qatar Airways flight 76 from Gatwick to Doha and the next day headed to the second floor of Qatar Airways Tower to start my job as “Flight Analyst” in the Revenue Management Department. Thanks Qatar Airways for taking a chance on me!

Q1. Is the new Loyalty Manager going to be running the whole Loyalty show at BA?

The most interesting statement in the job description appears about half way down the list of what the new employee will do:

“Lead creation of monthly CEOs Loyalty Board content and material.”

Clearly BA find Loyalty interesting and important enough that it attracts significant management attention and will be receiving more in the future.

That should be a good thing as it will help Loyalty get the resources it needs – money for computers and data, status within the organisation to get support from Sales and the chance to buy seats from Revenue Management.

But there may also be drawbacks. Competing stakeholders may seek to influence the CEO and shape Loyalty in their preferred image.

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Consultants rejoice! Implementing Artificial Intelligence (AI) at airlines is going to be tough. Managing it will be even harder. Airlines are going to need lots of human experts.

In the upcoming era of AI-powered airline technology, some issues will still need to be resolved by humans rather than out-of-the-box AI platforms. Legacies will stand. Decisions will need to be taken. AI will help airlines, but like every corporate asset will need to be well managed.

Among other things, the humans at airlines will ensure that AI platforms are working as they should. Different platforms may indicate different outcomes and make different recommendations. So human managers and analysts will also need to decide which of the many plausible strategic paths generated by an AI their airline should choose.

Even AI suppliers recognise this. OpenAI, the company behind the well-known ChatGPT platform, are now offering consulting packages starting at $10 million (£7.5 million).

They send in their engineers to figure out how to integrate AI with legacy technology and established ways of doing things. Not the actions of a company expecting to turn the world of industry on it’s head.

AI is going to be good news for many airline employees too. For people working in Commercial Division AI will create new career paths and tweak the old ones.

I have written before about how consumers adopting Large Language Models (LLM) is impacting e-Commerce today. In this article I am going to explore how I think AI is going to impact the Revenue Management career paths at airlines tomorrow.

Coming along at the same time as AI is the industry’s move to offer & order. Both of these trends will impact airline careers together.

Now read on…

Airline Revenue Management (RM) is perhaps one of the original AI platforms

RM generates a demand forecast. It is pretrained on historical data, often from airline Revenue Accounting. And it transforms the demand forecast into a set of inventory availability that picks up pre-defined price points to send a price to travel shoppers.

Generative. Pretrained. Transformer. In other words, RM is a species of GPT a bit like ChatGPT but more specific and less powerful.

It takes a lot of effort to get RM teams up and running. An airline that is serious about the discipline might spend 2% of it’s annual revenue on RM opex and 1% on RM capex. RM generates a lot of activity and a lot of work.

Every airline is organised differently. But somewhere within the orbit of a typical RM Department are five areas. AI will have a different impact on each.

First up is core RM, demand forecasting, inventory management and pricing

When it comes to day-to-day core RM, there are three organisational approaches.

1. Some airlines specialise their managers and analysts in one of these

2. Other airlines combine them all into single roles so one person handles all three

3. A third option is to combine demand and inventory, with separate pricing specialists.

Shortly after I arrived at Qatar Airways we shifted from option three to option one. This was part of a bigger RM change – the airline was busy adopting an over-priced and over-rated origin-destination RM system.

The core RM job is about managing what is in effect an AI system. Analysts and managers already have plenty of tools to generate all the standard charts and tables. As the airline industry adopts more advanced AI platforms in RM the job itself will not change.

AI will however cause some tasks in core RM to become more heavily automated than they are today. Existing RM platforms can observe changes in demand and translate them into price changes through inventory availability.

“Super-analysts” like Fetcherr’s Large Market Model used by Delta will be able to carry out these processes more quickly and thoroughly than today’s standard systems.

Large Market Models may also be able to scan the press and social media to identify special events, TV broadcasts and viral consumer trends that boost or reduce demand for air travel. They will get price changes out to the market faster.

But for the Demand Analysts and their Managers handling the demand forecast, there will still be many questions that AI Large Market Models cannot answer. Examples include:

1. Is meeting this month’s revenue budget more of a priority than next month’s or next quarter’s?

2. One piece of analysis (generated by AI) says we should prioritise high prices and another (also generated by AI) says we should prioritise lower prices to drive volume – which strategy do we think is more realistic and what should we do?

3. How should the airline trade off the varying levels of cost and risk associated with different overbooking strategies?

For all of these questions and many more AI can provide indicators of the answers. It cannot though decide which set of trade-offs the airline should choose. So Demand Analysts’ jobs are safe.

Jobs are safe for Inventory Analysts too, which we called Flight Analysts at Qatar Airways. I was first recruited in 2007 with the job title Flight Analyst but it turned out that I never actually joined that team.

The Flight Analysts and their counterparts at other airlines do not just ensure that seats are available for sale. They also handle weight and balance issues and set policies for rebooking and refunds when things go wrong.

AI can tell Inventory Analysts about the assumptions they can make for weight and balance. Or the costs and benefits associated with certain schedule change policies. But they cannot tell the Inventory Analysts exactly what they should do. The human element will remain.

In Pricing though AI could change many things. Today’s Pricing Analysts manage complex fare products with price levels and associated rules. It is likely that Large Market Models will automate much of the work in benchmarking and fare sheet management.

But at the same time as Large Market Models are entering the RM world to automate much of today’s pricing work, airlines are committing to move to offer & order. In this new framework, airlines are hoping to become money-spinning travel retailers.

They will build digital marketplaces like Turkish Airlines Holidays that will need all kinds of attractive travel content. In principle, airlines who get really good at retailing could offer flights for free.

So I expect that as AI automates the pricing process, pricing specialist will need to become more retailers. As well as price levels, they will need to design and develop product bundles.

Identifying which products might bundle well together given the airline’s customer profiles will be a job well suited to AI. Pricing Analysts will need to become good prompt engineers to get the optimum product designed in place.

This may not come naturally. British Airways has a track record of failing to understand what their customers want.

But there is one part of Pricing that will not change following wider adoption of AI. This is working with other teams, often in Sales and Marketing, to convince them that Pricing’s recommendations are sound.

Sales and Marketing will have their own AI. There is no guarantee that the other AI will give the same answers as RM’s AI. The dance where each department negotiates based on their own preferences will continue in the AI era.

Great Pricing Analysts today are highly skilled in navigating this dance floor. They will continue to need this skill even when AI is taking care of making the charts and the tables. Pricing Analysts who can transition into a retailing mindset will find their jobs safe as AI becomes widespread.

Second is RM systems development, which builds, tests and implements RM systems and ensures they are aligned with other airline processes like distribution and ticketing

Revenue Managers who enjoy coding and building software often love systems development. This part of the discipline has three broad components, which every airline splits into many more tasks:

1. Large-scale software development to implement software the airline has either built in-house or sourced from a third-party

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A recent job ad from London-based British Airways is just as interesting for what it does not include as for what it does.

The airline is looking for a new “Head of Revenue Delivery”. It appeared on my LinkedIn feed last week.

Although it looks great, I won’t be applying as if successful I wou…

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Fourteen years ago I boarded Qatar Airways flight 76 from Gatwick to Doha, leaving at 11am and arriving about seven hours later at 9pm local time. The plane A7-AEI (pictured) was a shiny Airbus 330 and I remember a smooth ride with a rather decent rogan josh for lunch. And for some reason the moving map was not working. That was the day I began my caree…

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From time to time people contact me to explore working together. Then on our call they tell me that they would like me to learn about their product and take it to my airline customers. This is not actually something I offer for two reasons:

1. The best person to sell your services is not me but you

2. If you are struggling to get airline customers there i…

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Airlines use a remarkably deep and complex supply chain to ensure passengers reach their destination safely, on-time and at profit. Yet carriers often fail to buy what they need and winning new contracts is costly and inefficient for suppliers.

Last time (click here) I explained that airline procurement suffers three headaches:

(i) Suppliers do not really…

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Airlines are some of the largest and most complex businesses in the world. A large supply chain offers everything that they might need, but because aviation is fiercely operations focused, low margin and the first priority is always safety it can be incredibly difficult to ensure projects bear fruit – airline procurement takes too long and outcomes are …

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The picture above shows the Doha-based pricing strategy team at Qatar Airways on 9th December 2010 – Paul, Faisal, Aljosa, Svend, me, Denisa, Merry and Amit. It was a great group and I would recommend working with them to everyone. Together, with the help of an expanding fleet, we helped Qatar Airways grow annual revenue from $2 billion to $5 billion.

Bu…

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