Welcome to the latest deep dive in our Airline UX Series, brought to you in partnership with 815Labs!
I always feel a bit sad when great digital minds leave the airline industry. But at the same time, it’s a perfect opportunity to reflect on key learnings. Remus Moraru is one of those great minds. Over the past seven years, he built digital products and UX teams and worked on ancillaries at Wizz Air. Along the way, we became friends, collaborating on multiple projects, and he’s been one of the biggest supporters of our Diggintravel content and research.
Now that he’s moved from airlines to the car rental industry, it was the perfect time to sit down and talk about his biggest takeaways. In this conversation, Remus, former Head of Ecommerce and Digital Product at Wizz Air, shares his experience and key lessons from seven years of building and optimizing airline ecommerce—how to build autonomous digital teams, and the ever-present build vs. buy dilemma in airline tech.
Listen to the new episode of the Diggintravel Podcast about airline ecommerce, UX, digital products, and how to build autonomous digital teams. Or, read on for key highlights from our talk with Remus:
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Remus worked across many different areas at Wizz Air—from ancillaries to digital products, from optimization to digital marketing—so the first thing I asked him was what he sees as the key to successful airline ecommerce. Not surprisingly, he emphasized the balance between all these areas:
What I think is crucial – and I think this is one of the key learnings – is as in life generally, it’s a balance. For example, in the case of selling tickets, if you want to push more volume, then you need to adopt one strategy. But you need to also consider other aspects. How do you make profits? How can you upsell more ancillaries? Then there is a way to balance on the other side that you need to consider to optimize and try to make the most out of both. Then it comes into factor, okay, how do I do this in a very consistent, easy fashion? UX comes into play, and merchandizing techniques too, to make sure that all that operation is smooth for the customer. Then the regulatory compliance comes in. There are a lot of things in motion, and you always need to play a balance game, in my opinion, to ensure that you cover everything.
But this balance isn’t just theoretical—it’s visible in the user experience. If one area is pushed too aggressively at the expense of others, tension starts to show, and that ultimately impacts the UX and, more importantly, the customer:
When the focuses shift from one to the other and you get stuck there too much – I saw that. Sometimes it creates a tension in the system, a tension for the customers as well that is visible, especially in the case of UX. Which then has some ripple effects down the line, which is a lot harder to solve.
After years of working on digital products, UX, ancillary revenue, and digital optimization, Remus sees one key factor as the foundation of digital success—building the right team. Even in his new role as CMO at Klass Wagen Group, it remains his biggest learning and top priority:
Building the team, how I’m going to build the team, is definitely one of the key topics on my mind every day, every evening. Making sure that we have a full-stack dedicated product team, ensuring that the team is autonomous fully in this sense and can build what they envision.
Looking back at his time at Wizz Air, Remus highlighted three key pillars for building strong digital teams:
At Wizz Air, this shift was not immediate; it was a deliberate transition from a traditional, waterfall-style project approach to a more agile, product-focused way of working. Instead of long, rigid development cycles where teams waited for approvals and handoffs, they moved to smaller, iterative releases, where teams could test, learn, and optimize on the go.
We started moving into product teams, setting up product teams to ensure that some areas have the right focus. The deeper you can integrate UX, engineering, and analytics into one team, the better the results.
For airlines looking to build stronger digital capabilities, the lesson is clear: transitioning from project-based work to product-driven teams is key. Invest in the team, give them ownership, and structure them for speed and agility.
At Wizz Air, building digital products wasn’t just about selling—it was about engaging customers and making their experience smoother. Two standout examples were Wizzride, a transportation booking service within the Wizz Air app, and Fare Finder, a tool designed to help customers discover the best ticket prices.
For Remus, these products were about more than adding new revenue streams; they were about understanding customer behavior and increasing engagement. Wizzride, in particular, was a project that stood out to him:
Wizzride was an interesting project. Personally, I was involved quite a lot in it. For me, it was interesting because it gave a different flair, a different aspect to the mobile application. It wasn’t just an ancillary product. It was an engagement tool more so than an ancillary.
While Wizzride was focused on engagement, Fare Finder and Price Watch were built around customer intent—helping travelers track fares and book flights when the price was right. These tools flipped the traditional airline transactional model, turning passive users into active shoppers.
The ultimate goal was to ensure that the customer has the option and the customer can find that option relatively easily, and they connect to that option. If he didn’t decide yet, then he can sign up for an update on that option and he’ll get an update and he will decide later whether that option – that flight, in this case – is something that he wants to book or not. But that engagement is already made because, one, there is a decision that the customer wants to get an update, so you can already communicate with him, and then there’s a second decision point where you communicate with him and then potentially he says, “Yes, okay, I want to fly, so I’ll book that at that price.
For airlines looking to build successful digital products, the lessons from Wizz Air’s approach are clear:
Rather than just selling flights and ancillaries, airlines should think like digital retailers, building products that keep travelers engaged, informed, and coming back.
For airlines investing in digital transformation, one of the biggest strategic decisions is whether to build their own digital platform or buy an off-the-shelf solution. Each approach comes with trade-offs—building offers control and customization, while buying provides speed and convenience.
Having led digital product development at Wizz Air, Remus saw firsthand why this decision isn’t black and white; it depends on long-term strategy:
I don’t think there is a yes or no answer to this. I think everybody should look at what they want to achieve and where they want to be in the next one, two, three years. This is critical to understand, ‘What is my strategy for the next two to three years?’ Thinking long term.
While building an in-house platform gives airlines full control, it also requires ongoing investment and maintenance. Buying an external solution might offer faster implementation, but it comes with vendor lock-in and limited flexibility. Remus explained that airlines must weigh these factors carefully:
Some providers say, ‘My solution is plug-and-play; you just put it in and it works and that’s it.’ But with an ecosystem such as an airline, where you have different systems, legacies, and so on, it’s very hard to say plug-and-play. It all boils down to what you want long term.
For airlines making the build vs. buy decision, Remus outlined three key considerations:
Ultimately, Remus emphasized that airlines need to balance speed and strategic control. In some cases, starting with a buy approach and transitioning to build may be the smartest move:
When you’re pretty big, I think some of the ideas that you want to test out can also go towards the buy and say, ‘Okay, let’s try with an external partner, external solution, and see if that works. And if it works, then we can decide later on how we can insource that.’ The investment risk is a lot smaller, and the learnings are a lot faster. Both have their own benefits. Long term, definitely I think insourcing and ensuring that you have the capabilities, you have the control of what you’re doing pays off. That’s long term. Short term, I think the benefits of buying are clear.
If you want to learn from leaders like Remus about airline UX, ecommerce, digital analytics, digital optimization, data science, and AI, or just want to be the first to know when our next interview will be published, please:
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