This is the fourth conversation in our 2025 Airline Leaders Series—produced in collaboration with our partners at 815Labs, whose support makes it possible for us to meet airline digital leaders in person and share their stories firsthand.
This and the next interview were both recorded in Lisbon, Portugal, during the World Aviation Festival. It was a great opportunity to connect with inspiring airline professionals from around the world, exchange ideas, and capture the energy that comes from these face-to-face talks.
We’re especially glad to feature Juliana Ramirez, Chief Digital Officer at Flair Airlines, whose perspective on digital growth, innovation, and digital experience perfectly embodies what this series is all about—different journeys, different insights, all contributing to the shared goal of building better airline digital experiences.
Leader: Juliana Ramirez
Airline: Flair Airlines
Role: Chief Digital Officer
Location: Vancouver, Canada
Talks about: Digital Strategy, Digital Product, Ancillary, Culture, Startups, Organization
Why you need to watch this interview:
Juliana Ramirez brings a rare mix of startup grit and corporate discipline to her role as Chief Digital Officer at Flair Airlines. In this conversation, she opens up about what it means to build a “team of builders,” why ownership mentality matters more than titles, and how a lean, integrated structure can be a real competitive advantage for airline digital teams.
She also shares the thinking behind Flair FWD, the airline’s bold initiative to rebuild brand trust, reliability, and emotional connection through innovative digital products. From startup lessons to partner collaboration and data-driven decision-making, Juliana’s insights demonstrate how to balance innovation with focus.
If you’re interested in how modern airlines can move fast, stay agile, and build customer trust through digital products, this interview is a must-watch. Check out our video recording of the full interview with Juliana Ramirez here, or continue reading for key excerpts and quotes from Juliana during our discussion.
Audio Interview
If you prefer the audio format, you can listen to the conversation on the Diggintravel Podcast:
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Here are five key insights from our conversation with Juliana Ramirez. To understand the full context and the thinking behind Flair Airlines’ digital strategy, culture, and customer experience, as always, watch the full video or listen to the complete podcast episode.
In the startup world, everyone owns the problems of the company. Your role is not defined by the title of your role; it’s defined by what you think is risk in the organization. So everyone is hustling, everyone is solving more problems, everyone is wearing a ton of different hats.
Having that ownership mentality is critical and it’s what I try to embed in the organization. I think today at Flair, I have that team that owns the problem of the company and goes above and beyond what their roles are. And I think when you’re building foundations of the tech stack, the product, that’s super critical.
Why it matters:
Juliana’s version of digital leadership is about accountability and shared purpose rather than hierarchy. By hiring people who treat challenges as their own, Flair Airlines is trying to build a culture where teams can act fast to identify key customer friction points and address them by improving the digital experience or building new digital products.
That’s one of the questions I now am asking in my interviews. I ask them, “Are you an optimizer or a satisfier?” And there’s no wrong or right answer. I consider myself, for example, an optimizer. I try to do things always towards perfection, and sometimes I find myself reflecting, “Hey, it’s fine to fail.” You just have to get it done. Progress is the enemy of perfection.
So when I see I have these traits in some of my leaders or some of my team members and they are hiring for their own teams, I try to look for the balance between both. You want to have the right mix of an optimizer and a satisfier, where the satisfier is the leader and the optimizer is the analyst or the specialist.
Why it matters:
Juliana’s analogy captures one of the challenges in building agile digital teams. The goal is to combine startup speed with the structure, focus, and ability to prioritize of a larger organization. At Flair, that means knowing when to push for perfection and when to move fast.
Flair FWD is our commitment to deliver on our promise. Flair FWD is, yes, our rebranding strategy to make travel affordable in Canada so that Flair becomes the easiest airline to fly emotionally, financially also, and physically. We want to be a loved brand. We want for our customers to have physically, in the airport, while they book, a seamless experience.
Why it matters:
Flair FWD is a full rebranding and digital transformation effort aimed at rebuilding customer trust, focused on removing friction from every step of the journey: new payment methods for smoother booking, a growing focus on seamless onboard retailing and digital payment options, and reliability-driven products like the On-Time Guarantee, Checked Bag Guarantee, Travel Flex, and Disruption Guarantee. Each of these initiatives supports the message that Flair is a reliable, customer-focused airline that delivers on its promises. Most of these products are available only when booking directly via FlyFlair.com, reinforcing the airline’s push to grow direct sales and communicate with customers more effectively.
We actually flew people to different cities that we operate. We had four different Feedback Forums, and not only myself—the CEO personally sat down with them, listening to their complaints. It requires some skin, because you put all your hours into building products and then you hear the customer perception. But opening up a Feedback Forum has been super critical for the Flair FWD strategy.
Why it matters:
Flair’s Feedback Forum was a simple but powerful way to hear directly from customers. Instead of relying only on surveys or online reviews, Juliana and the leadership team met passengers in person to understand their experiences and frustrations. These sessions helped Flair identify key pain points, adjust its roadmap, and shape both product and brand initiatives under the Flair FWD strategy.
source: Flair Airlines LinkedIn Post
To me, nothing beats the willingness to learn, still. So if you really want to learn and build a career on data science, data engineering, development, product manager, operations—we see a lot of cases internally at Flair, and I’m very proud of that, where someone starts as a revenue manager, for example, and then they move to the ancillary team, and then they move to the airport side. The skillset you gain in 18 months with going through that eventually gives our people the ability to define who they want to be in their careers very early. But they would never get there if they didn’t have that thirst to learn.
Why it matters:
Juliana, like many leaders in our previous Airline Leaders Series conversations, identified curiosity and a willingness to learn as key skills, even in an AI-driven world. At Flair, cross-functional experience and a willingness to explore new areas are what help people grow fast and understand the full picture of how an airline operates. She also emphasized that with AI, many people focus on use cases and outcomes, but without understanding where the data comes from, the business processes, or how the systems connect, it’s impossible to bridge the gap between vision and reality.
If you want to learn from leaders like Juliana about how to build innovative airline digital products or want to be the first to know when our next Airline Leaders Interview will be published, please:
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