Episodes
Wednesday Jun 10, 2020
5 Key Lessons For Airline Digital Future
Wednesday Jun 10, 2020
Wednesday Jun 10, 2020
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
Monday May 25, 2020
Airline Industry Outlook - Q&A with Henry Harteveldt
Monday May 25, 2020
Monday May 25, 2020
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/
Thursday Apr 30, 2020
Tips For Your Personalization and Experimentation Program [Ronny Kohavi, Airbnb]
Thursday Apr 30, 2020
Thursday Apr 30, 2020
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/
Thursday Apr 16, 2020
3 Future Scenarios for Airline Distribution and Retailing [Nina Wittkamp, McKinsey]
Thursday Apr 16, 2020
Thursday Apr 16, 2020
"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/
Tuesday Mar 31, 2020
Technology and Digital Trends: 2020 – 2025 Outlook [Miha Kralj, Accenture]
Tuesday Mar 31, 2020
Tuesday Mar 31, 2020
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/
Tuesday Mar 24, 2020
Tuesday Mar 24, 2020
"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/
Wednesday Mar 04, 2020
Experimentation Tips From a Digital Expert at Gartner
Wednesday Mar 04, 2020
Wednesday Mar 04, 2020
In this episode we talked to Shiva Manjunath, Marketing and Conversion Optimization Manager at Gartner. Shiva is a huge experimentation and digital enthusiast, so we talked about how to build a great experimentation program in your organization.
What can you learn from this interview:
- The conversion optimization process - where and how to start?
- Why is getting early wins crucial to your success?
- How to deal with your boss who doesn't understand the experimentation process and A/B testing
- Why personalization, conversion optimization, and experimentation go hand-in-hand
- How CRO helps you calculate the ROI of your personalization program
- How to scale up your experimentation
- Why "test to learn, not test to win" is the way to long-term conversion optimization process success
- How improv helps Shiva with experimentation and understanding users better
You can find the link to the full interview article with transcripts and all links here:
https://www.diggintravel.com/conversion-optimization-process/
Wednesday Feb 26, 2020
Wednesday Feb 26, 2020
We talked to Joel Goldberg, Chief Digital Officer at Wizz Air about airline industry, latest trends and how to build a digital program in a low cost environment.
What else you will learn from this interview:
- Joel’s background and how he ended up in the airline industry.
- Why Wizz Air looks at digital transformation differently – learn about their pragmatic, ULCC approach to airline digital transformation?
- How to scale up – how they run a digital program and initiatives to support their fast-paced growth and large scale?
- Where do they see the biggest opportunities in data and emerging technologies like artificial intelligence and machine learning?
- Why experimentation and a “fail fast – fail small” approach is the key to their digital success?
- Other interesting points that will make you look at the 2020 airline digital trends differently.
You can find the link to the full interview article with transcripts and all links here:
Wednesday Feb 19, 2020
Digital Strategy: From Vision to Execution [EL AL Israel Airline]
Wednesday Feb 19, 2020
Wednesday Feb 19, 2020
In this episode Shahar Markovitch (Chief Digital and Innovation Officer) and Amit Sagi (Digital Director) at EL AL Israel Airlines join Iztok Franko to talk about their digital strategy. We talked about key pillars of their strategy and the challenges of executing it in practice.
What else you will learn from this interview:
- What are the two big digital trends EL AL sees which were the key to their airline digital strategy?
- Why EL AL joined Digital, IT and Data into one big unit to support their execution?
- What are the key challenges of doing e-commerce and digital marketing in a legacy airline environment?
- Why changing the mindset from “project” to “product” view is a must if you want to develop digital solutions?
- Can cooperation with the startup community help you be more agile and digital?
- How data and agile BI fit into their airline digital strategy and help EL AL make faster decisions?
- Listen to examples of some of EL AL’s new digital products that help solve their customers’ problems.
- Why food Instagrammability might be even more important than its taste to the digital generation?
You can find the link to the full interview article with transcripts and all links here:
https://www.diggintravel.com/airline-digital-strategy-from-vision-to-execution/
Tuesday Feb 04, 2020
Google Expert’s Tips for Mobile UX Design and Conversion Optimization
Tuesday Feb 04, 2020
Tuesday Feb 04, 2020
Iztok Franko, founder of Diggintravel.com talks to Anna Potanina, a Google expert on mobile UX and conversion optimization (CRO). Anna talked about key things she learned after she and her team at Google have performed more than 600 UX, mobile and CRO audits.
What you will hear in this interview:
- How design sprints and user testing labs work?
- What makes companies successful at conversion optimization?
- Why just looking at data and analytics is not enough? Why qualitative research really matters?
- What is Anna's personal favourite UX research method?
- How to do CRO & UX design on mobile?
- What is different when doing design and CRO for mobile?
You can find the link to the full interview article with transcripts and all links here: