The Diggintravel Podcast

Vanesa Tejada, Head of Product at LATAM Airlines shares her story and view on key principles of building modern, agile digital products.

The key to building modern airline digital products is to combine experimentation with an agile, data-driven, customer-centric approach.

Vanesa shared great examples of how they do that in practice in a large LATAM organization that has more than 23 sites and 40 digital product teams.

One more thing! Don't forget to check the website article after you finish the podcast!

The article has a list of 5 key principles and links to all resources mentioned in our talk with Vanesa. Here is the link to the article:

https://bit.ly/2FYe2kB

Link to the Airline Digital Academy:

www.diggintravel.com/academy?utm_source=podcast&utm_medium=show_notes

Can the current crisis also be an opportunity to innovate and accelerate your digital initiatives? We talked about this with Kai Ling Ting, Innovation Lead at Etihad Airways.

She explained how the Etihad innovation team not only tries to build digital solutions to address COVID-19 challenges but also changes the travel digital experience for the better in the long run.

We also talked about how Etihad cooperates with start-ups and how they foster innovation in a large airline organization environment.

Learn more about the 3 Etihad digital innovations we talked about in the podcast here (including links and pictures):

https://bit.ly/32Xjr4J

What are the latest travel demand trends? How is Skyscanner doing demand and traveller sentiment analysis? How will Skyscanner and meta-search evolve? Will the airline distribution landscape change in the future?

We talked about all of this in our recent podcast with Gavin Harris, a travel industry expert and Commercial Director at Skyscanner.

But there’s more!

You know we always want to be as hands-on and practical as possible at Diggintravel. So, you can see Skyscanner’s latest demand data in action and find examples of real agile travel analytics dashboards in this article:

https://diggintravel.com/agile-travel-analytics-external-demand-data/

"Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don't know which half."

This is a quote you probably heard many times, right?

I talked about how to figure that out with Ravi Shankar, Global Head of Digital Marketing and Analytics at AirAsia who is one of the brightest minds in airline digital space.

We talked about AirAsia digital marketing, how they measure it, how they organize their team, what they insource, how they use data, how they chose which digital channels they will be on….
 
Ravi also talked about the transformation journey AirAsia is on – from selling flights only to becoming an OTA, a tech company and how this will change the way his digital marketing team will work in the future.

You can find the link to the full article with a lot of additional resources here:

https://www.diggintravel.com/airline-digital-marketing-air-asia-case/?utm_source=podcast&utm_medium=show_notes

Think of this episode as "the best of" or "greatest hits" episode. Why?

Because in this episode we summed up the key learnings from our 2020 Airline Digital Research and Survey, where we surveyed 49 airlines on how they do digital product development, digital marketing and digital optimization.

But there is more; on top of the 5 key learnings from our research you can also hear best quotes from the top digital experts we interviewed during our research. Top quotes are from leaders from Airbnb, Google, CDOs of Wizz Air and EL AL Israel Airlines, best-selling book author from Harvard and more.

NOTE: You can get the full 2020 Airline Digital Yearbook, a 92 page PDF with more than 50 charts, benchmarks and real-life examples here:

https://bit.ly/3fakYqO

You sent questions, we answered them. For our first podcast milestone, the 10th episode we did a special Q&A session with an airline industry analyst Henry Harteveldt.  You asked us about the airline industry outlook, how soon will the recovery happen, which segment will come back first, changes in passenger behavior, blocking the middle seat, ancillary revenue, distribution, what will happen with investments in digital and much more. Plus Henry shared some of the insights from the great research he’s doing with the Atmosphere Research Group.

You can find the link to the full Q&A article with Henry here:

https://www.diggintravel.com/airline-industry-trends-2020-2021/

Personalization, artificial intelligence and machine learning are hot topics. But how can you measure if your personalization initiatives and your algorithms really work?

Ronny has worked in the fields of data mining and machine learning for more than 25 years. He is an authority in the area of experimentation and co-author of the book Trustworthy Online Controlled Experiments: A Practical Guide to A/B Testing.

Before he joined Airbnb, Ronny grew the experimentation platform (ExP) team at Microsoft to over 110 data scientists, developers, and program managers to accelerate innovation at Microsoft through trustworthy analysis and experimentation.

But Ronny is not just an experimentation expert! In the past, he was Director of Data Mining and Personalization at Amazon, so he also has tons of experience in the area of personalization.

Listen to the full Diggintravel Podcast interview with Ronny to learn more about:

• What is the role of online experiments in the current crisis?
• Why do you need a trustworthy environment for testing?
• How can you define the right metrics (OEC – overall evaluation criteria)?
• OEC and other great examples from Amazon and Microsoft
• How are experimentation, personalization and machine learning connected?

You can find the link to the full interview article with Ronny here:

https://www.diggintravel.com/airline-personalization-and-experimentation-program/

"Where is the value in airline retailing?" - this is a report McKinsey & Company published recently. I talked to Nina Wittkamp, one of the authors about airline retailing and 3 future distribution scenarios. 

Will consolidation happen? Will airlines become travel platforms? Will players like Google and Amazon take over? Check out the second part of our talk with Nina to hear more about these scenarios.

Listen to the full interview with Nina to learn more about:

• Where is the value in airline retailing?
• What are the key challenges of airline distribution and retailing?
• The 3 components of airline retailing (NDC, One Order, Dynamic Offers)
• The 4 key enablers of airline retailing
• Future airline distribution and retailing scenarios
• The most important elements of successful innovation programs

You can find the link to the full interview article with the link for McKinsey report here:

https://www.diggintravel.com/3-future-scenarios-for-airline-distribution/

Current situation will make a lot of us re-think. Overnight, we are all faced with the fact that nobody knows what will happen next. But what we know we will all need to change and adapt at some extent.

But, how can you build a future-proof technology stack that will be up to the task to change or when the next "big change wave" hits us, just like the current one did?

To get you some answers, I talked with a person who knows a thing or two about how to build modern, future-proof technology and digital platforms. Miha Kralj worked for IBM, Microsoft, Amazon Web Services and is now at Accenture.

We talked about key technology and digital trends that will impact us in the near future (2020-20205):

- Key tech trends

- How to start big digital transformation projects

- 4 key pillars of future-proof technology setup (architecture, process, tooling, execution platform)

- Transition from DevOps to BizOps and server-less

- Who is responsible for digital transformation (CIO, CTO, CDO, CFO or CEO)

- Why airlines are playing catch-up with big travel digital platforms

- The technology that will have biggest impact in the future 

You can find the link to the full interview article with notes and all links here:

https://www.diggintravel.com/future-proof-airline-technology-2020-2025/

"Business experimentation brings the scientific method to management decision-making. If you make changes without running experiments, you’re playing the lottery." - this is quote from our today's guest Stefan Thomke.

He is a Harvard Business School Professor and author of the book Experimentation Works: The Surprising Power of Business Experiments. Stefan is an authority on the management of innovation and has studied the best companies like Microsoft, Amazon, Booking.com, and Netflix, among others.

What you will learn about business experimentation from this interview?

• Real examples from Booking.com, Microsoft, Apple, JCPenney, and the retail world
• Why is business experimentation much more than just digital optimization and A/B testing?
• How to organize for experimentation: 3 organizational models based on your size and maturity
• Why is generating hypotheses crucial for your experimentation?
• Experimentation platforms: build your own or use a third party tool?
• Testing big vs. small incremental changes
• 2 types of experiments: cause-effect experiments (optimization) and exploration discovery experiments
• How can airlines experiment in the offline, non-digital environment?

You can find the link to the full interview article with transcripts and all links here:

https://www.diggintravel.com/airline-innovation-business-experimentation/