Amazon knew I was running low on coffee before I did. My airline still does not know I always choose a window seat and will happily pay for it.
That is not a quirky observation. It is a commercial problem worth billions.
In 2026, airlines are projected to generate $145 billion in ancillary revenue globally, up from $67.4 billion less than a decade ago. That number sounds impressive until you realise how much of it is being left on the table. McKinsey estimates that better retailing techniques could unlock up to $45 billion in additional industry value annually by 2030. The gap between what airlines earn and what they could earn is not a pricing problem. It is a data activation problem.
The Data Is There. It Is Just Not Working
Airlines are not data poor. A commercial director at a mid-size carrier is sitting on years of booking history, seat selection patterns, loyalty tier behaviours, ancillary purchase rates by route, by fare class, by device. The Passenger Service System holds a detailed record of almost every transaction a passenger has ever made with the airline and fellow alliance members.
At its core, the PSS architecture was built for reservation management, not omni-channel retailing or intelligent merchandising. As a result, data exists in silos and loyalty The limitation is that the PSS architecture was built for reservation management, not retail merchandising and intelligence, and the data exists in silos. Loyalty segments live in one system, booking behaviour in another, on-site browsing in a third. They rarely talk to each other in real time, and almost never in a way that impacted what a passenger sees at the point of purchase.
In fact, only 37% of aviation companies in 2025 sucessfully implemented a data lake, which tells you something about the technical reality most airlines are navigating. The data foundations to make genuine airline personalisation possible are still under construction for most carriers.
Amazon, by contrast, has built its entire business model on behavioural data activation. Every click, every scroll, every abandoned basket feeds a machine that continuously recalibrates what to show you and when. There is no "next quarter" roadmap for deploying that insight. It is live, contextual, and already incorporated into the next page you see.
Only around a quarter of all air ticket offers sold in 2024 were dynamically created. The rest were static, rule-based, and largely indifferent to the specific person shopping. That is the data gap in plain numbers.
Example: Who's Actually in Seat 12A?
Here is a concrete example of what dynamic airline personalisation looks like in practice.
Take a morning departure from Dubai to London. Three passengers are on that flight. They booked through the same website, within the same booking window, at a similar fare.
Passenger one
is a frequent flyer. She has taken this route eleven times in the past two years, always books a window seat, has purchased lounge access on seven of those trips, and her last two bookings included a fast-track upgrade at a late stage in the journey. Her loyalty data tells a clear story: she values comfort over cost and makes decisions close to departure.
A smart dynamic offers engine surfaces her preferred window seat pre-selected in the seat map, presents a targeted lounge bundle at check-in, and sends a contextual upgrade prompt 48 hours before departure when her willingness to pay is historically at its highest. She does not need to search for any of it. It finds her.
Passenger two
is booking his first long-haul flight with the airline. He is travelling with a toddler, indicated by a companion ticket, and his browsing session showed him looking at extra legroom seats before pulling back at the price. He has not bought anything beyond the base fare.
For him, the right offer is not a premium upgrade. It is reassurance. A pre-selected bassinet row, a reminder about the family check-in lane, and a reasonably priced seat bundle that removes stress. These are not upsells, they are solutions. The conversion follows the relevance.
Passenger three
is a corporate traveller on a managed booking. He books frequently but almost never through the airline's direct channel. He has status, but the airline barely knows him because the data is fragmented across GDS and travel management company touchpoints.
Without data integration, he gets the same generic homepage as everyone else. With it, the airline can recognise his profile, acknowledge his status, and present the business-relevant extras he actually values: lounge access, priority boarding, flexible fare options. Building that kind of contextual intelligence requires connecting the dots across channels and surfacing the right signal at the right moment.
Three passengers, three entirely different commercial conversations. Most airlines are having the same one with all of them.
Why the Technology Gap Is the Real Bottleneck
The commercial instinct to personalise exists in most airlines. The ability to execute this does not.
Legacy internet booking engines were designed to display fares and collect payment. They were not built to ingest behavioural signals, run experiments in real time, or adjust what a passenger sees based on who they are. As a result, well-intentioned personalisation efforts often amount to adding a passenger's first name to an email subject line and calling it done.
Research consistently shows that a significant gap exists between what airlines aspire to deliver in terms of personalised, context-aware interactions and what they can currently execute. This is not a people problem. The commercial teams understand the opportunity. It is an infrastructure problem.
A modern airline ecommerce platform closes that gap by doing what the legacy stack cannot: connecting behavioural data, loyalty signals, and real-time context into a single layer that shapes every interaction. Not as a post-booking email campaign, but live, during the booking journey itself.
That is what airline retailing maturity actually means in practice. Airlines adopting NDC and modern order management are already seeing ancillary revenue increase by 15 to 25% on those channels compared to legacy GDS bookings. The technology is not theoretical. The revenue impact is measurable.
What Happens When You Actually Activate the Data
Oman Air’s digital transformation illustrates what is possible when an airline moves from static retailing to a truly data-driven model.
Before Oman Air implemented Branchspace's digital retailing platform, Triplake, its share of direct digital sales accounted for under 20%. Within 14 months, that figure accelerated to over 70%.
Their lead-to-booking ratio reached 5.37% during promotional periods. The platform introduced real-time A/B experimentation on cabin fare displays, gave the commercial team live control over offer presentation without vendor dependency, and enabled contextualised ancillary offers adjusted by multi-dimensional passenger analytics.
None of that is magic. It is the result of building a digital commerce layer that treats every passenger session as a unique data signal rather than an anonymous transaction. Triplake’s real-time analytics and experimentation capabilities, Data Hub, affords commercial teams continuous visibility into conversion and revenue performance across the entire booking journey, and the ability to act on it immediately.
This is the difference between airline personalisation as a marketing aspiration and airline personalisation as a commercial engine.
The Cost of Standing Still
Low-cost carriers using dynamic pricing models are seeing 28 to 30% increases in ancillary uptake. IATA data suggests conversion rates can improve by up to 50% when offers are matched precisely to customer intent and willingness to pay. The airlines moving on this are pulling ahead.
The ones that are not are still operating an internet booking engine from a different era of the internet, showing the same seat map and the same ancillary shelf to every passenger who walks through the digital door.
Airline ancillary revenue now represents 15.7% of total airline revenue across the industry. For carriers with the right infrastructure, it is substantially higher. For those relying on static, undifferentiated offers, they are fighting for share of a market where the gap between the best and the rest is widening every year.
Amazon is not a direct competitor. But every passenger who interacts with Amazon, Netflix, Spotify, or any platform that understands their behaviour will carry that expectation into the booking flow on your website. The bar is no longer set by other airlines. It is set by the digital experiences passengers have every day.
The data to meet that bar already exists inside your systems. The question is whether your platform can activate it.
