After a successful 2024 run of the Airline Leaders Interview Series, where ecommerce, digital, and marketing leaders from across the industry shared their goals, challenges, and insights, we’re back with a brand-new 2025 edition.
Thanks to your great feedback and the continued support from our partner, 815Labs, we’ve taken the series to another level. That means deeper conversations, a stronger focus on personal growth, and perhaps most exciting of all, the chance to sit down with leaders in person and capture their stories in the places where they work and lead.
Stop number two in this year’s series takes us to Istanbul, where we met with Sevilay Gökduman, Head of Digital Channels and Ecommerce at Pegasus Airlines.
Leader: Sevilay Gökduman
Airline: Pegasus Airlines
Role: Group Head of Digital Channel Management & e-Commerce
Location: Istanbul
Talks about: Digital Growth, Personalization, Brand, Loyalty, Mobile and App engagement
Why you need to watch this interview:
Sevilay Gökduman isn’t your typical airline digital leader. With a unique journey that spans revenue management, loyalty, brand, and now digital and ecommerce, she brings a rare cross-functional perspective to building modern airline experiences.
In this conversation, Sevilay shares how Pegasus Airlines is pushing the boundaries of what it means to be a digital-first airline—especially when it comes to mobile engagement, app-based loyalty, and gamification. She talks candidly about the challenges of balancing low-cost efficiency with customer-centric UX, the team structures behind digital experimentation, and how to use tools like personalization and A/B testing to improve both conversion and long-term engagement.
If you’re curious about how to build true digital loyalty, not just transactions, this is an interview you don’t want to miss.
Video Interview
Check out our video recording of the full interview and full context with Sevilay Gökduman here, or continue reading for key excerpts and quotes from Sevilay 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!
Sevilay: I have been with Pegasus Airlines for 16 years. I started at revenue management, and almost 9 years I worked there. It was great because I learned a lot, not only about pricing, not only about dynamics of revenue management, but also about the airline business. Because the networking, the operations, revenue management works a lot with all of those departments. But then I wanted to go to the marketing side to have a more direct relationship with the end customers, so I moved to marketing as Head of Loyalty. I was the head of our loyalty program, BolBol, for almost four years. For some time I was also responsible for brand and customer analytics. And for the last three years, I have been leading digital channel management and ecommerce team.
Our team [Digital Channel Management] is part of the marketing team. We have also a digital team at the IT department. But under marketing, we have four departments: loyalty, customer analytics/brand, ancillaries, and digital channel management. And under my team we have the product team, performance marketing, SEO, and data analytics and outbound channel management. We also have UX/UI design, but not within Pegasus, we are working with an agency there. However, it’s a long-lasting relationship, so they’re a part of our company.
About in-sourcing UX, UI, CRO, testing, optimization, and analytics roles
Sevilay: We want to have all of these units together, starting from how we can generate traffic, whether organic or paid channels, then converting them and having the data. Our data analytics was also outsourced, but for more than one year, we have one colleague in the team. It really helps us with the analytics and to learn from data. Also on the CRO part, now we have a colleague in the team. Working together as a team and having different aspects helps a lot.
Sevilay: Being Türkiye’s digital airline, that’s our vision. Starting from day one, we were promoting our digital channels and we were seeing our digital channel not just like a sales channel, but we believe that it is at the core of the experience of the customers. So from day one, we were investing in our digital channels. We have many features that most of our competitors don’t have at the moment. We are always keen to invest in digital, how we can improve our customers’ experience, both offline and digital.
Sevilay: There are lots of initiatives, but I can summarize two or three topics. The first one is personalization. It is not new, and it will not end this year, so we will continue working on that. We are working already with our CRM team, we have a well-prepared background. On the digital side, we are getting digital data about our customers and using it for personalization. But we want to go beyond the banners, etc., the content.
This year we want to focus on a personalized booking funnel. We are trying to figure out if we’ll change the SSRs first, which one must be shown first, or can we shorten the booking path for some of our customers while we show the longer one for the others. Of course, as a low-cost airline, it is a challenge because we have to convert the traffic, but we also have to sell some ancillaries. So we are trying to find a balanced way. We will run A/B tests, this year we are focusing on that. We are aware that it is a challenge but I think testing is also a great opportunity to learn.
For example, if you are a new visitor, maybe we can show you some other option, skipping the ancillary parts, etc. If you are a frequent flyer, then you are familiar with the system, so we know that you are selecting seats, so I can show the seat first and leave the others in one page, etc. We have lots of ideas, but we want to test and learn. We were testing on the web earlier this year, and we are also starting A/B testing on the mobile app.
Sevilay: The timing, time to market is always a challenge because as head of the digital team, I see that there are many needs from other departments, and we have to prioritize them. Airlines are not as simple as other ecommerce businesses. It takes time; sometimes some things take longer. I think time to market is really important. To develop and to get into the market, and prioritizing is very important.
Sevilay: We have agile teams, for more than one year now, in digital product and in the other departments of the company. Agility is important, and of course, open communication, the members of the team can bring their ideas. Involving the team for the decision-making is getting easier this way, I think, because the team is in the business. They are running the operations and they see the problems, they see the opportunities, sometimes better than us, and sometimes looking from the top gives another perspective. So working with the team and having open communication makes it easier.
The resources are always limited, but being able to say “let’s stop doing this now and focus on that” or “let’s make it this way,” sometimes decreasing time of the development and having an MVP and focusing more on other issues, helps to speed up time to market.
Sevilay: We are focusing not just on transactions. One of our priorities is post-booking experience. We have given a lot of attention to our loyalty program. Gaining customers is one challenge and turning them into loyal ones is another. We keep investing in our loyalty program, and we are always working as a digital team with the product team so we can get a holistic approach together.
BolBol is our loyalty program. You can earn points and use those points for ticketing for yourself or for the ones you want. BolBol is also a part of our digital experience, because if you are a BolBol member then you can save your information, credit card, or other people you travel with a lot. So it is always going hand-in-hand, the loyalty program and the digital experience.
We also developed the BolBol game. People can play the game and earn points, but then when they come to the app, they familiarize with us. In the game you can find some hidden objects. It is easy, and people are very engaged with the game. After we launched the game, we saw a rapid increase, in fact for a while, we had to close the game, and on the App Store, there were some comments. People were telling us, “Where is the game? We want to play the game,” etc. So it is obvious that it increases engagement.
source: Pegasus Airlines website
About building engagement on mobile
Sevilay: In 2024, the Pegasus Airlines app was the most used airline app in Türkiye, and it still is. We are paying attention to both, our performance marketing side and on the app engagement. For example, the post-booking period, we inform our guests on the mobile app, we are sending push notifications. Now we are working on a project called Timeline. We want to assist users with everything they need until the completion of their travel. We see the app as a travel buddy and are investing in that part.
On the other hand, we are running mobile-only campaigns. For most of our campaigns, tickets are sold through the mobile app because the users of the mobile app know about the campaign one day before. We are sending push notifications, “Tomorrow we will have a campaign; don’t forget to check our mobile app.” These are all increasing our engagement.
source: Pegasus Airlines website
Our mobile app is mostly used with BolBol login. They go hand-in-hand, actually. We see from the numbers that BolBol also increases our brand awareness. The experience is high because we can provide a better experience when they sign up. We have branding for our brand, but also for the mobile app and the BolBol program, so we always promote our loyalty program and mobile app when we promote our brand.
Sevilay: I don’t want to say AI again, but…I have to say AI because we are following the changes on that part because of our SEO and performance channels. It will have an impact.
We get traffic from the GPTs, and there is no guideline how to handle that part. So we are following that and seeing if there will be any change. Also, AI is changing our searching habits. When we Google something, we have different search habits. Voice will be a part of our lives and I think voice could be one of the areas that we will be interested in. So we are following not to be late on that part. For the airline specific, we talk about offer and order. It will be an issue for the next 4 or 5 years, I think. AI is changing every day, but offer and order may take time. We are also following the changes on that side.
Sevilay: I think being in digital means that we are working with so many departments within the company, and we have agencies, third parties that we work with a lot together. So I always learn new things in an organic way. But of course, to learn, I follow some newsletters, some blogs, and I think our partners help us to go through these new things, especially on the ecommerce side. Every day there is a new change, and we are working hand-in-hand with those parties. I think on the digital role, you have to learn. You cannot resist learning, and myself, I am open to learning. That is why I changed from several roles.
With AI, now I think learning is so much easier, because if you hear something, you can get lots of information quickly. I try to follow some thought leaderships, some companies, newsletters, etc. And also within the company, we share ideas. When we learn something, we always discuss and talk about it together. Pegasus has an environment of sharing information.
If you want to learn from leaders like Sevilay about how to advance your airline digital retailing or want to be the first to know when our next Airline Leaders Interview will be published, please:
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