The Diggintravel Podcast

In this episode, you can listen to insights from an airline industry expert and researcher Henry Harteveldt from Atmosphere Research. Henry talked about the research commissioned by the Accelya Air Transformation Lab and conducted by Atmosphere Research is called “Airlines: A path back to profitability ”. The research is a great analysis of the latest airline retailing and other industry trends. W...

 I see so many airlines build new digital solutions to adapt to the new reality of travel.  The move to a touchless, contactless, digital journey is on every airline agenda.  But what is the process behind building these new airline digital solutions? I talked to Diego Brunot, UX Lead at American Airlines. Diego and his team work on what is now a crucial part of the airline travel journey, the pos...

In this special episode, I talked to Lukas Vermeer, Director of Experimentation at Booking.com.   We talked about how travel digital giants like Booking.com use experimentation to build great travel digital products. What can you learn from this podcast: - How Booking.com is organized and how they changed as they scaled up experimentation - What kind of experiments you should run and in what cases...

On today's episode will talk about robots and innovation with Innovation expert and visionary Ravinder Ravi Singh. Robotics and robotic process automation were one of the digital trends I identified when I was doing research for our 2021 Airline Digital Trends report. AirAsia recently talked about robotic process automation, and Turkish Airlines is doing it. To learn more about it I talked to Ravi...

To start year 2 of the Diggintravel Podcast on a high note we talked about one of the hottest topics in the travel industry: the 2021 outlook for travel retailing and distribution. Who will build the ultimate travel retailing platform? Airlines, OTAs, Google, or Amazon? Our guest Mauricio Prieto is a travel visionary and an expert in travel distribution and travel. Mauricio was one of the co-found...

In this special edition of Diggintravel Podcast, we did a group chat with four participants in our Airline Digital Academy. We talked about our 2020 learnings and 2021 expectations with: Barbara Zimmer, Manager of E-Distribution at Qatar Airways Mwajuma Salim, Head of Digital Commerce and Customer Experience at Kenya Airways Leda Koleilat, Senior Ecommerce Assistant at Qatar Airways Stanislava Yor...

In this episode, Esamatti Vuolle, Head of Digital Commerce at Finnair talks about their digital transformation journey. What else you can learn from this podcast: How Finnair digital transformation was disrupted by the pandemic and how they adapted What was his one key learning about digital Why Finnair built in-house digital teams and digital platform How Finnair agile customer-centric digital pr...

Today you can learn from one of the best digital and UX experts in the travel industry - Rui Pereria, Director of Product Design & UX Research at eDreams and former Head of UX Research at Ryanair. What will you learn from this podcast? How eDreams adapted their digital and research activities during the COVID pandemic What mistake Rui was doing at Ryanair that he learned the most from How to do UX...

In this episode, Iztok Franko, founder of Diggintravel.com shares his views about airline recovery and how it will change airline digital marketing short-term and long-term. Topics covered: why airline digital & marketing should react to faster planning cycles how will new consumer behavior affect the digital experience what are the opportunities for airlines because of the new customer behavior w...

COVID-19 changed your user's behavior significantly. You need to understand the new context for your users, their fears, their key friction points before you do any other digital activities. We talked about how to do that with Amanda Stockwell. She is a user research expert and one of the most popular instructors on LinkedIn Learning. She consults both Fortune 100 companies and start-ups on how to...

This week, Ido Bigger Chief Data Officer and CIO at EL AL Israel Airlines shared his story about the journey EL AL made to become a data-driven airline.  If you want to learn how to implement modern, agile analytics and how to adopt a data-driven culture across the whole organization then you need to listen to this talk with Ido. BONUS: If you'll listen to the end you'll see that Ido challenged me...

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...

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...

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 han...

"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 organiz...

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 th...

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...

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...

"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 scena...

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 ta...

"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 inno...

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? H...

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 transfor...

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 thei...

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 optim...