After a successful 2024 run of the Airline Leaders Interview Series—where ecommerce, digital, and marketing leaders from across the industry shared their goals, initiatives, challenges, and future outlooks—we’re back for another year of deep conversations.
Thanks to the great feedback and with continued support from our partner 815Labs, the 2025 edition brings even more. This time, we’re adding a personal growth angle to each discussion—something many of you, current or future airline digital leaders, told us you valued most.
And there’s one more exciting change: following our first in-person conversation with Srdjan Prokić from Air Serbia last November, we’ve decided to take things offline more often. So in addition to article summaries and podcast episodes, you’ll also get to watch the video versions of our talks whenever possible. We kicked off our 2025 Airline Leaders interviews in sunny Palma de Mallorca, and I hope you’ll enjoy this and all of the next interviews in the series.
Leader: Ismael Monzón
Airline: Air Europa
Role: Head of Digital Growth
Location:
Talks about: Digital Growth, Digital Experience, Data, AI, Conversion Optimization, Personalization, CDP
Why do you need to read this interview:
Ismael Monzón isn’t just a digital leader at Air Europa. He’s been a longtime friend of the Diggintravel community and one of the earliest supporters of our research and content initiatives. From his start as a one-man digital analyst to leading a 20-person Digital Growth team, Ismael shares a practical, behind-the-scenes look at how to build and scale digital growth team in a real airline environment.
In this conversation, he dives into new customer acquisition strategies, conversion optimization, personalization, and how to approach AI and CDP projects with a clear long-term vision. He also opens up about his leadership journey and mindset toward continuous learning. If you want inspiration for growing both your digital results and your digital career, this is the interview for you.
Video Interview
Check out our video recording of the full interview and full context with Ismael Monzón here, or continue reading for key excerpts and quotes from Ismael shared during our discussion.
Audio Interview
If you prefer the audio format, you can listen to the conversation on the Diggintravel Podcast:
And don’t forget to subscribe to the Diggintravel Podcast in your preferred podcast app to stay on top of the latest airline UX, digital strategy, marketing, data science and AI trends!
Ismael: Air Europa was launched almost 40 years ago. It’s changed quite a lot since then. In fact, before COVID we were focused on the long haul, but we tried to catch clients from Spain moving from the Balearic Islands or Canary Islands to the mainland, tourists and others. After COVID, our strategy changed. Right now, our role or mission is to move people from Europe to Latin America and the opposite, and we are focused on that. We have our hub in Madrid, and we unified our fleet with Boeing, and most of our flights are from Europe to Madrid, and Madrid to Latin America. This is our current goal and it’s our core business.
I joined the company eight years ago, and it changed quite a lot since. When I met you, I was alone in the Digital Analytics Team, and right now I lead a Digital Growth, a team of about 20 people. We are structured inside the digital area into two parts, the first one is Digital Platform and the second one is my Digital Growth team. Digital Platform is in charge of building and maintaining the website and the app. My team is in charge of the traffic and content area, another one for data, and a small one that we have launched this year that we focus on personalization.
We handle almost 30 markets. When you have to handle with different currencies, languages – for example, we handle eight languages. Well, in a few months it will be nine; we are launching Turkish because we have launched a new route from Madrid to Istanbul. It’s complicated handling different markets, different languages, different currencies. And not only that, sometimes it’s difficult to handle different client perspectives, because here in Spain, we can say that Air Europa is a well-known brand. But in Latin America, the situation is different.
Ismael: The main goal is trying to increase the sales. But I think that’s so generic. We have different projects, and we try to set specific goals for each team, for each project, to try to keep the team motivated and even promote them to develop new ideas. In the case for example a project for new landing pages, we have defined to try to achieve more people searching flights.
We think about where we would like to be next year, in 2027, but we know that we have to go step by step. Regarding the projects or the current goals, for example, one month ago we launched a project to try to optimize our landing pages. Till now, we were focused on CRO and the booking funnel.
We try to understand the clients and try to develop and personalize the strategy. And it is related to another key project for this year, which is personalization initiative, and try to select a CDP platform. It’s a huge project. Our goal is to launch it in 2026, so this year is only for selecting and trying to configure, to make some developments. But in the end, we think that we have done a great job in previous years, but we need to go a step farther and try to adapt the contents – not the design, but the ideas, our value proposition – for different clients, different markets, different perspectives. And for that, we think that the CDP is the best way. But first of all, we need to understand which drivers can move the results before we start with campaigns and on site personalization.
All non-paid channels are under my duties, and our goal is trying to use personalization along all the booking process, from the email, from the homepage, and start with that. But our idea is to start to personalize the flight results page, even the confirmation page, to try to sell another product, other ancillaries in the future. Or for example, My Booking page. We have a lot of people who are arriving on that page before check-in. So if we can personalize this page to offer the right ancillary at the right moment, it could be a great opportunity to continue improving the sales and our results
Ismael: The data area is under my duties, and I have a clear view that if you don’t have data to analyze all your activities, it doesn’t make sense. Because when you have millions of users a month, in the end, sometimes one thing works, but on the other hand, it doesn’t work. One day it works and then the following week it doesn’t.
So if you don’t have data to measure – and not only measure, to take decisions – it’s one of our challenges for this year. We have been collecting and gathering data for many years, the technical part. We have been working on that really hard for several years, and right now we are trying to evolve, to go a step farther and try to get more insights with what we need to do to continue improving our efforts.
We took the decision to split the data team between the technical part and the more analysis part to keep the analysts’ time focused on analysis and insights, because if not, my experience is that you always have something technical to fix, and in the end you spend one day, one week, and you say, “My technical side is fine, but I didn’t have time to analyze and try to find insights.”
One of my other challenges is to find the balance between the daily basics and trying to think about the future, trying to look not only for the next month, even for the next year or even a couple of years ahead. Because when a team grows from four or five people to twenty, in the end, you can’t handle everything. I started to delegate. We reorganized the team. We split it into three areas, and I have delegated most of the parts of the daily basics. I only try to set goals, and the rest of the team is working on achieving those goals.
But one of my challenges – not only on the technical side, on the organization side – is trying to find time to think about where we’ll be in 2026, in 2027, and what we need to do today to arrive to that point.
Ismael: Sometimes it’s really complicated. Where is the hype, what is true? What will be the next thing? Last year, I did – it’s not an MBA, but it was similar, such as an MBA express. A teacher told us about the Three Horizons model by McKinsey. I think it is a good approach. Just an introduction is that you need to dedicate 70% of the time for your current business; 20% is for things that can be in the short term, maybe next year, the following year; and 10% is for Horizon 3, which is more ahead maybe, in the long term. In our case in the digital industry, we can say maybe three, four, five years. I’m not so strict, but when I plan the projects and I organize the work with the team, I try to follow it.
Ismael: It’s impossible to have this kind of conversation and avoid AI. But I can tell you a couple of projects that we are starting to work on.
We are starting to try to understand how the LLMs are working, are indexing our content. We have started last week a tool that tries to understand what are the sources of ChatGPT. It’s true that Google has never published the rules, but if you have been an SEO, you have SEO in your team, you know what techniques work and what not. With ChatGPT, Gemini, these tools, the field is really new, and you can try to understand, you can develop; sometimes you will be right or not. But from my perspective, it is inside this 10%. I ask specifically to the team, we need to dedicate time, we need to dedicate resources at least to try to develop some actions, to try to understand why, when you ask ChatGPT, “What is the best airline to fly Madrid to Buenos Aires?”, maybe Air Europa can be the answer – or not. But in the end, I think it will be a new source of traffic. We have seen that it’s true that it is growing.
Another idea is to develop an AI agent who helps us at least to have a first review, how it’s performing, the traffic channels. Our final goal will be to have an assistant, an AI agent, which can ask the first analysis every day, every week, to have the first insights, instead of splitting by ourselves, market by market or channel by channel. Why? Because when you have 30 markets and you handle half your traffic acquisition channels, it’s impossible just to have the minimum analysis to try to understand.
Ismael: I started in the digital industry as a UX designer. I worked for seven years as a designer. After that, I worked three years as a product manager. After that, five years as a digital analysis. And the last five years, we can say that I work as manager or leader.
But one thing that I have noticed in the last stage is that when you are learning something more related with a technical field, the path is more structured. It’s like a ladder and you can climb it. I remember that before COVID, I was learning SQL, you can handle the basic queries, you can go farther, and you can join an advanced course. You know what is the finish line. But when you are talking about managerial skills or soft skills, I have noticed that it is more complex. I would like, for example, to improve my communication skills, or how to handle long-term projects. You can read a book, you can listen to a podcast, but every day, the situation is different. It’s not the same. It’s something that is continuously improving. It’s something that I have assumed that I need to keep learning every day, and that’s my mindset.
How I try to handle it? I try to focus on a specific topic, and I try to understand, what books can I read, or what events can I attend to have at least a structured path? I have my daily basics dedicated to learning, but I’m open to new things. Why? Because you don’t know what will be the next thing that you need. Something that I think is interesting and maybe is not for today, but I note in my agenda, maybe next month, next quarter, I can investigate further.
In general, I try to have the same attitude, whether it’s about personal growth or work at the office: stay positive, keep pushing, and always do our best.
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