The Diggintravel Podcast

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/

Ronny Kohavi, an expert in experimentation and personalization, discusses the role of online experiments during the current crisis and the need for a trustworthy environment for testing. He shares great examples from Amazon and Microsoft, and explores the connection between experimentation, personalization, and machine learning.

"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/

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/

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: https://www.diggintravel.com/2020-airline-digital-trends/

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/

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: https://www.diggintravel.com/airline-mobile-ux-design

Iztok Franko, founder of Diggintravel.com talks to Lennart Dobrovsky, Director of Research and Intelligence at Lufthansa Innovation Hub about the future of travel, the state of the airline digital maturity and their latest airline digital benchmarks report. What you will hear in this interview: - Iztok's intro on about how Diggintravel's digital retailing benchmarks and Lufthansa Innovation Hub research are connected. - How Lennart started with research and why he changed his football career for learning and research? - What kind of digital projects they do at Lufthansa Innovation Hub? - What is behind their mission of "create and capture value beyond flying"? - What kind of digital products they build? - Why is Lufthansa Innovation Hub analyzing airline digital maturity and how can one measure digital innovation in the first place? - How did they analyze airline digital maturity with their Airline Digital Index (ADiX)? - What was the biggest surprise when they evaluated airlines? - What can airlines and other travel companies learn from startups? You can find the link to the full interview article with transcripts and links here: https://www.diggintravel.com/airline-digital-benchmarks-by-lufthansa-innovation-hub/