2023 Airline Industry Digital Benchmarks [2023 Airline Digital Optimization Yearbook]

Iztok Franko

Diggintravel is your best resource for ecommerce and digital benchmarks. For the fourth straight year, Diggintravel conducted an airline survey to understand airline digital maturity when it comes to various parts of digital optimization: digital team setup, digital optimization skills, user and UX research activities, digital analytics, experimentation & A/B testing, digital optimization tools, internet booking engine flexibility and organizational support for digital optimization.

Below you can find links to our previous yearly reports and more info about the state of airline digital optimization in 2023 – the 2023 Airline Digital Optimization Yearbook.

• 2023 Airline Digital Optimization Yearbook – 55 surveyed airlines
• 2022 Airline Digital Optimization Yearbook – 52 surveyed airlines
• 2020 Airline Digital Optimization Yearbook – 49 surveyed airlines
• 2019 Airline Conversion Optimization Whitepaper – 38 surveyed airlines
• 2018 Airline Conversion Optimization Whitepaper – 28 surveyed airlines

2023 Airline Digital Optimization Survey And Yearbook

Diggintravel’s 2023 Airline Digital Optimization Survey is the fifth survey and benchmark of digital optimization in the airline industry.

Going into the fifth year of our evaluation, the survey will provide you with an overview of the evolution of this exciting ecommerce discipline. This survey certainly won’t be the last, as Diggintravel will continue following the digital optimization developments and airline ecommerce trends. Every year, the survey has evolved as we continue to develop our maturity model and our digital optimization questionnaire. The 2023 survey was significant, as it marked the fifth anniversary of Diggintravel’s airline digital research. This is why, apart from the yearly benchmarks, we wanted to see how airline digital teams and optimization practices have evolved since our first survey back in 2017.

The survey investigates the maturity of the digital optimization processes and key challenges airline professionals face in their digital and conversion optimization efforts.

During the last quarter of 2022, our survey questionnaire was sent to more than 110 airline senior ecommerce, digital optimization and digital marketing executives.

The survey represents the views and insights of 55 carriers (a 6% increase from last year’s turnout, where 52 airlines participated). The survey will provide you an intriguing insight into the state and developments of digital optimization for the airline industry.

What Did We Ask Airline Digital Pros – the 2023 Airline Digital Optimization Maturity Model

The goal of the survey was to evaluate digital optimization maturity within airline organizations. For evaluation of maturity, we evaluated several digital optimization maturity models and revised last year’s Diggintravel Airline Digital Optimization Maturity Model.

The new and revised Diggintravel Airline Digital Optimization Maturity Model consists of 8 areas:

• 7 general digital optimization areas: people, skills, analytics, user and UX research (revised area), test quantity, tools, organizational support
• 1 airline specific area: internet booking engine (IBE)

You can see the exact questions and results for each area in the special section at the end of the Yearbook PDF report. Each area was ranked from Level 1 (basic) to Level 5 (most advanced). We also added new questions to evaluate the maturity of the digital optimization processes in addition to the 8 questions by area. These were the new questions added to the questionnaire:

• Does your team follow a process for conversion optimization?
• Does CRO and digital optimization have its own budget?
• How are experiment results and learnings implemented and shared across the organization?

2023 Airline Digital Optimization Maturity Model

Since personalization is a hot topic and we believe it is closely connected to digital optimization and CRO (conversion optimization), we evaluated whether airlines are combining conversion rate optimization and personalization activities and what kind of personalization engines they’re using.

A Quick Glance at the 2023 Results – High-Level Summary

Based on the revised Diggintravel Airline Digital Optimization Maturity Model and survey results by each area, we classified each participating airline into one of the following four categories:

Laggards, Challengers, Visionaries, Leaders

We grouped our 8 maturity model areas into two major groups:

• Completeness of vision—here we grouped areas that relate to understanding the importance of the digital optimization process, culture and organization (People, Skills, and Organizational Support)
• Ability to execute—here we grouped areas that relate to the ability to execute a digital optimization process in practice (Analytics, User and UX Research, Test Quantity, Tools, and Internet Booking Engine)

Based on the results, we classified each participating airline into one of the following four categories: Laggards, Challengers, Visionaries, and Leaders.

2023 Airline Digital Optimization Survey Results (by Diggintravel)

According to our benchmark, we detected:

• 15 Laggards
• 7 Challengers
• 25 Visionaries
• 8 Leaders

The graph above shows how these categories correlate with the size and type of airline.

Click the link below and download the PDF version of our 2023 Airline Digital Optimization Yearbook. With this Yearbook, you’ll get:

• More than 100 pages of in-depth analysis and airline digital optimization best practices
• 50+ charts, real-life examples and case studies
• Special interviews and tips for airline digital pros from the world’s best digital optimization and experimentation experts
• Airline digital optimization team’s growth over the last 12 months
  

Get your 2023 Airline Digital Optimization Yearbook now »

Iztok Franko

I am passionate about digital marketing and ecommerce, with more than 10 years of experience as a CMO and CIO in travel and multinational companies. I work as a strategic digital marketing and ecommerce consultant for global online travel brands. Constant learning is my main motivation, and this is why I launched Diggintravel.com, a content platform for travel digital marketers to obtain and share knowledge. If you want to learn or work with me check our Academy (learning with me) and Services (working with me) pages in the main menu of our website.