Nicholas Liotta is a senior commercial strategy researcher at Alaska Airlines. Nicholas received an undergraduate degree in aeronautical engineering and learned about RM when he was a transportation MS student at MIT and worked with Peter Belobaba. Nicholas likes the fact that RM is a challenging field that is very concrete — meaning “you get to build algorithms and models and test them in simulation environments or actual markets and get concrete, tangible results.”
One reason Nicholas likes working at Alaska is because of its culture. “Alaska is a Fortune 500 company but has a small company vibe with a small corporate structure. This allows you to get more interactions with senior leadership.”
Nicholas envisions a future of RM in which we will have more bundled products and continuous pricing but also potential implementation challenges as the industry transitions to NDC and some travel agencies adopt this new technologies whereas others do not.
Nicholas recommends that students interested in RM look for teams that are focused on new development and innovation. While many graduates start their careers in RM departments and are responsible for managing the day-to-day prices and inventories, Nicholas finds that graduate students interested in OR and analytics are better suited to the research and development teams.
Interested in learning more about Nicholas? Check out his LinkedIn page. One fact about Nicholas you won’t find online is that before joining Alaska, he never flew on the airline, but now it’s the airline he flies the most!