I read a piece this week on Turkish Airlines and their Modern Airline Retailing platform. Yılmaz Goralı, who runs product development for Turkish Technology – an airline subsidiary, said something that’s stuck with me:
“The unit of commerce is no longer a fare. It is an offer.”
Simple line. Big implication.
His argument is that airlines have spent decades operating inside systems that define the product indirectly through fares, booking classes, and rules. That worked when the product was a seat. It does not work when the product is contextual, personalized, and selected at the moment of interaction.
The part I keep coming back to is what he said about AI.
Most of the industry frames AI agents as a threat to distribution. Goralı flips it. If the interface shifts toward AI assistants, the airlines that still rely on static fares become interchangeable. The ones that can serve up structured, contextual offers give the assistant something useful to work with. AI stops being a disruptor and starts being a multiplier.
Same logic applies to inflight entertainment, which is where I now spend most of my time. For years, IFE has been a static monthly catalog. Same content for everyone on the plane, refreshed on a cycle that has nothing to do with what passengers actually want. It’s the IFE equivalent of a published fare. It made sense when the system could not do anything else.
That constraint is now gone.
At West Entertainment we’ve been building WestIQ on a very similar thesis. The product is not the catalog. The product is the offer, constructed in context, informed by behavior, delivered to the right passenger at the right moment without ever touching their personal data. A Korean traveler on a red-eye out of Seoul should not see the same homepage as a business traveler on a morning flight to Frankfurt. Neither should see a homepage built six weeks ago in a programming meeting.
What Goralı said about organizational change is the harder issue to solve. He pointed out that pricing, inventory, digital, and operations have lived in separate silos for decades. Retailing forces them into one decision system. The tech is the easy part. The governance is what kills most of these projects.
I think the same is true for inflight entertainment. The shift from catalog to contextual offer is not really a technology problem. It is a workflow problem, a procurement problem, and a “who owns the passenger experience?” problem. The airlines who figure that out first are going to look very different from everyone else in about three years!
