by Monica Badra, Founder & CEO, Aero NextGen
Travel demand is at a record high, which is part of why the direct channel has become so challenging for airlines to acquire. The World Travel and Tourism Council forecasts the sector’s contribution to the global GDP hitting a record in 2025 at $11.7 trillion, with international visitor spending passing $2.1 trillion, surpassing the 2019 peak. Everyone in the funnel knows it: online travel agencies and metasearch platforms are bidding aggressively, and the cost of attention is skyrocketing. Yet, what most airlines neglect is that they already have the information on what is selling, to whom, and how far away from the date of departure. Airlines that win the direct channel will not be the ones with the biggest spend but rather those that have used the data from the revenue systems already present in each airline to their advantage.
Direct Channel is Where the Economics Are Decided
Every single booking that goes through an airline’s own channel represents the margin, ancillary revenues, and customer loyalty. On the other hand, every booking through an OTA and metasearch platforms is a loss of some of those. That is why it is of paramount importance to prioritize the spending on direct marketing, and why the current airline marketing stack is failing them.
The challenge is that the airline has to pay for the same passenger acquisition twice: once to the distribution channel, and again in the marketing spend to the ad platforms on the same terms, while competing with other providers using OTAs and meta searchers. As demand increases, as is forecasted to happen in 2026 and beyond, this acquisition cost is simply unsustainable, and the direct channel is the only way to offset it. The competition for the limited attention of the customer has raised the bar to such a level that it is a matter of survival for many airlines to find ways to optimize their direct marketing spend.
Airlines Sit on the Data. The Ad Platforms Do Not
An airline possesses one of the richest commercial datasets, most of which is not utilized by their ad platforms. Booking records, CRM, and reward data, together with fare class and load factor insights with a long etcetera, all point to the specific flights that need to be marketed and the passengers that should be reacquired. Marketing decisions, on the other hand, are mostly driven by the information the ad platforms have on in-platform conversions and last-click assumptions.
That is where the value of the first-party data owned by the airline comes into play: the information on what is selling and not selling, load factors, and days-to-departure should inform the marketing spend. Inside an airline, marketing and revenue management functions operate on disconnected systems with different goals in mind.
Perishable Inventory Makes the Data Even Harder to Ignore
An airline seat is one of the most perishable items sold anywhere: the moment the plane takes off, the seat is empty forever, and the potential revenue from it is gone. This perishability is what makes the challenges of revenue management even more difficult compared to other industries.
Take, for example, two flights, one of which has significantly more available seats than the other. A campaign that is optimized for conversions may allocate the same amount of spend on both, with the one on the flight with few available seats getting more than it would need. On the other hand, a campaign that utilizes load factor and days-to-departure will be able to adjust the spend to prioritize the flights with limited seats and get more value per impression.
From Data to Decisions, Inside the Ad Account
The future of airline marketing is the ability to tie together the systems that possess the necessary commercial data and let the ad spend reflect the business’s specific needs. Such a solution would make the optimization process run on autopilot or be driven by the business’s rules, have access to the information required to make decisions in real-time, and report on marketing performance in a way that meets the airline’s requirements. The ad platforms would receive the audiences, targeting options, and allocation rules that come from the data the business already owns without having to rely on the assumptions of the platforms. This way, the airline has the power to decide how much of the processes should be automated based on the data and what should be managed manually, with the marketing spend being a reflection of the revenue opportunity.
This is precisely the direction in which the industry is moving, and it is the most logical way to approach the challenges of direct channel marketing in the short and medium-term.
In Partnership with Stack Overflight
Stack Overflight is a travel technology company developing products designed specifically for airlines, digital experience, passenger communication, disruption management, data and marketing. The products are designed to be PSS-agnostic and built upon a unified philosophy of “from airline data to decisions.”
The two products that align with the challenges presented above are the Travel Marketing suite, which manages, monitors, and optimizes paid acquisition and lifecycle marketing campaigns, connected to the airline sales systems through an agentic optimisation engine, and a Data and AI layer that unifies the data from various sources, creating real-time insights and utilizing travel-specific models to generate valuable predictions, dynamic pricing, and unified customer views across channels. Together, they enable an airline to connect the dots between the systems that hold the revenue opportunity and the platforms that invest in marketing spend.
The demand backdrop, and the catch:
| ~$11,700,000,000,000 Record 2025 travel & tourism GDP (WTTC) | $2,10,000,000,000 International visitor spend, above 2019 peak | $0 Value of a seat once the door closes |
“Airlines do not have a data problem. They have a data-activation problem. The commercial and operational signals already exist across the PSS, CRM and revenue systems. Our role is to turn those signals into real-time decisions, connecting airline data with the digital experiences, operations and marketing actions that ultimately drive revenue. “
– Xavier Brascó, Founder & CEO, Stack Overflight
The Aero NextGen take
The airlines that pull ahead in the direct channel will not be the biggest spenders. They will be the ones that treat their own data as the marketing asset it already is. Winning back the direct booking is not a bidding war; it is a data-activation problem, and the advantage belongs to the operator who connects the revenue signal to the spend. Aero NextGen exists to match that kind of operational pain point to the vetted providers who can solve it, so airlines spend less time evaluating tools and more time capturing demand.
“Airlines sit on the data. The cost of attention is only going up. The airlines that win will not be the ones with the biggest budgets but the ones that turn the data they already own into the signal that directs every dollar of marketing spend. That is the whole game in the direct channel now.”
– Monica Badra, Founder & CEO, Aero NextGen
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Sources
- World Travel & Tourism Council – 2025 Economic Impact Research: record ~$11.7T sector GDP; international visitor spend ~$2.1T, above the 2019 peak
- Codeless – Airline Marketing: airlines paying twice, in commission and in ad spend to defend their own brand terms (July 2026)
- Stack Overflight – airline-specific product suite: Travel Marketing connected to airline sales flows with an agentic optimisation engine; Data & AI layer
- Stack Overflight – Aero NextGen vendor page
