Geopolitical disruption, pressing sustainability targets, and workforce shortages are just some of the complex issues that have dominated airline CEOs’ in-trays this year. In a keynote CEO panel from World Aviation Festival 2025, three leaders in the airline industry discussed the most pressing challenges and how they’re dealing with them.

Moderated by Henry Harteveldt, Travel Industry Analyst, Atmosphere Research Group. the panel included:

  • Luis Rodrigues, CEO, TAP Air Portugal
  • Luis Gallego, CEO, International Airlines Group (IAG)
  • Willie Walsh, Director General, IATA

All three panellists saw a good ecosystem for future growth regardless of current challenges. Walsh highlighted the difficulty of decision-making at the top of the airline tree:

It’s very difficult to get that balance between the pressure of quarterly results and the ened to invest over the next 25 years. Actually, sometimes, the long-term decision is the easier decision to take 

A dominant theme of the discussion was sustainability, with Gallego, Rodrigues, and Walsh all expressing disappointment with the EU and how regulation is currently being dealt with. Walsh believes more needs to be done by other players to pick up the slack and accelerate greener practices.

The transition to net zero is going to be extremely challenging and extremely expensive. And it’s not good that other players in the so-called value chain expect the airline industry to pick up the bill.

Managing different customer expectations was also a discussion: airlines must balance the demands of an expanding elderly population and younger travellers, generations which expect very different things from their travel journey. At the head of IAG, Gallego says this is easier to manage because each member airline appeals to different customer profiles.

We have a low-cost carrier, Vueling, alongside Iberia and British Airways. It’s good because we learn from each other, because a passenger flying point-to-point from Barcelona has different requirements to a passenger flying long-haul Heathrow to New York.

In terms of the economic outlook, Rodrigues is ‘slightly optimistic’, and argues that the fast-changing world requires new ways of thinking.

You can no longer look at the world as one, everything moving in the right direction with the same trends. We require a more granular approach and understanding that there are sectors where I’m going to struggle, and others where I’m going to have great business. And we need to move the resources between them to take advantage of both situations. 

Building resilience in an unstable geopolitical environment has made predictions for growth difficult beyond 2025. But Walsh still sees reasons to be optimistic for the years ahead in an industry that can withstand frequent turbulence.

Demand for travel continues to be good. You look at Canada, Canadians have definitely slowed down travel to the US, but they didn’t stop flying. Canadian airlines just moved capacity from US markets into Mexico, the Caribbean, and Europe. As an industry, we can respond to short-term changes.

🎥 Watch the video to hear the panel’s full discussion on resilence, sustainability, and growth in 2025 and beyond.

Questions asked include:

  • As airlines, how are you navigating geopolitical uncertainty?
  • Do you think the industry has lost momentum on sustainability targets?
  • How are you prioritising or deprioritising tech investment?
  • What kind of growth can we expect to see in the years ahead?

Join us at World Aviation Festival 2026 to hear airline CEOs discuss the state of the industry.

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