How Airlines Become Data Driven: What Five Years of Airline Consulting Taught Me About Data

After a six-month break, the Diggintravel Podcast is back with the start of a new series: How Airlines Become Data Driven. Over the last five years, alongside hosting more than 70 conversations with airline leaders, digital executives, UX experts, and industry practitioners, I have also spent much of my time working directly with airline ecommerce and digital marketing teams. These projects ranged from helping airlines improve digital measurement and analytics foundations, to building joined views of marketing and ecommerce performance, to more advanced experimentation and data science initiatives designed to better understand what actually drives airline business results. In this first episode of the series, I share some of the biggest lessons and observations from those consulting engagements and explain why becoming data driven is often much harder than it looks. In this episode, we talk about: Why I decided to bring the Diggintravel Podcast back after a six-month break Why this series is a return to Diggintravel's roots in airline ecommerce, analytics, UX, and digital marketing The different types of airlines and digital teams I have worked with over the last five years Why airline size matters less than organizational maturity The three stages of becoming data driven: foundations, insights, and causation Why building a common view of the business is often more important than building another dashboard How constant change, shifting priorities, and organizational complexity make data-driven transformation difficult Why routines, habits, and shared understanding are critical ingredients of data-driven culture Why alignment across marketing, ecommerce, analytics, IT, UX, and leadership often matters more than technology This episode serves as an introduction to the broader How Airlines Become Data Driven series and lays the foundation for the topics we'll explore in future episodes, including measurement, analytics, experimentation, organizational learning, and AI-driven change. If you're involved in airline ecommerce, digital marketing, analytics, data science, or digital transformation, this episode provides a practical perspective on what it really takes to build a more data-driven organization. RESOURCES: Full article with highlights and key takeaways from this episode: https://diggintravel.com/how-airlines-become-data-driven/