What airlines learned from the digital retailing push

Looking back at the airline industry’s digital retailing push as it stood around 2019 is a useful exercise, because 2019 was the last normal year before everything accelerated. The maturity surveys and industry research from that period exposed a set of gaps between ambition and reality, and the pandemic then compressed several years of intended change into eighteen months. This piece draws out the lessons that proved durable.

It synthesises published industry findings on digital retailing maturity rather than any single proprietary survey.

The ambition was personalisation at scale

By 2019, the stated direction of travel was clear. Airlines wanted to sell the way online retailers sell: dynamically, personally, in bundles, across clean digital channels, with ancillaries presented as desirable products rather than hidden fees. The New Distribution Capability standard was maturing, direct channels were gaining share, and the language of Offers and Orders was entering the industry vocabulary. The ambition was genuine. The execution lagged it.

The maturity gap was integration

The surveys of the period kept finding the same thing. Airlines scored reasonably well on customer-facing digital touches, an app here, a personalised email there, but poorly on the integration underneath. Reservations, loyalty, merchandising, and e-commerce systems were siloed, often legacy, and unable to feed a single coherent view of the customer. You cannot personalise at scale if your systems cannot agree on who the customer is. The retailing ambition was real; the plumbing was the bottleneck.

Ancillary merchandising was uneven

Ancillary revenue had already become strategically important by 2019, but the way it was sold was immature. Too often it arrived as a confusing cascade of checkboxes at checkout, which is merchandising in only the thinnest sense. The better operators were beginning to bundle ancillaries into coherent offers tied to the trip type, a family holiday sold differently from a same-day business trip. That differentiation, not the mere presence of ancillaries, was the real retailing skill, and few had mastered it.

What the pandemic changed

The pandemic did two things to this agenda. It forced a step-change in digital adoption on the passenger side, as contactless became non-negotiable and app-based everything became the default. And it forced airlines, under existential cost pressure, to finally tackle the legacy integration work they had been deferring, because the carriers whose systems could flex were the ones that survived the volatility. Work that was planned for a five-year horizon got done in eighteen months.

The durable lessons

Three lessons from the 2019-era research have proved durable. First, integration is the whole game; without it, every retailing feature is a fragile front on top of creaking systems. Second, personalisation that is not grounded in clean first-party data is a liability, because getting it wrong in public damages trust fast. Third, ancillaries sell best when they are framed as relevant to the specific journey, not as a generic fee schedule.

Where it shows up now

The carriers that took those lessons seriously are the ones whose digital experience now leads the industry, and the gap between leaders and laggards has widened rather than narrowed. On the conference floors at the global exhibitions, digital retailing maturity is no longer a future topic but a present one, discussed alongside the aircraft orders and the wider story of how the fleet is planned, sold, and filled.