The next digital transformation was a key topic at World Aviation Festival 2025. From seamless apps to AI agents and personalised interfaces, the aviation industry needs to adapt fast to keep pace with the expectations of young customers.

Danielle Harvey, Vice President, Travel & Hospitality Strategy at Quantum Metric sat down with us to share more insight on the rate of change. The increasing preference for mobile booking and self-serve options makes it more essential than ever that airlines understand their different digital channels.

Thinking about airlines, they’re tasked with driving conversion, ancillary sales, loyalty. And sometimes those are conflicting goals. You can’t just sell everyone a base fare. You need to maximise revenue. So you have to pay special attention to what your customers want. 

Customers can choose between mobile apps, website, and now chatbots when booking travel. Harvey says airlines should be striving to deliver a cohesive experience across their channels, while monitoring digital activity to discover bottlenecks.

Today a lot of companies are organised by product. But the customer does not understand or care that those product owners are different, and they’re expecting you to deliver a consistent experience. The goal is to have a culture that’s customer-first rather than channel-first. 

As a real-time digital analytics platform, Quantum Metric helps airlines understand why travellers might be switching from app to website, or vice-versa. Using these insights, they can develop a full picture of customer behaviour across a range of touchpoints. This is especially critical in the aviation industry, where IROPs and other disruption mean airlines need to act quickly on digital communication and re-bookings. Quantum Metric’s generative AI summaries can help fix data faster, ultimately creating a more seamless experience.

Everybody used to talk about data democratisation, which is important, but this takes it from data democratisation to insight accessibility. So this is really getting people not just to numbers, but to answers.

🎥 Watch the interview to hear the full conversation with Danielle Harvey.

Questions asked include:

  • Booking, check-in, ancillary sales – airlines have raced to digitise these processes, but what kind of meaningful insights can we extract from the ways digital customers are interacting with each of these experiences?
  • What are the challenges for airlines running digital operations across multiple different shopfronts – app, website, kiosks?
  • How can real-time insights make the travel industry more proactive when it comes to supporting their customers? How can investments in AI enhance how airlines are able to respond to customer needs?

Join us at Aviation Festival Americas 2026 to discuss digital innovation in aviation.

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