Joseph Mathews is director of commercial strategy and advanced analytics in the analytics and innovation (Ai) group at United Airlines. Ai partners with business units across United to help identify opportunities to increase revenue and improve operations through analytics, better forecasting, and decision-making.
Like many who work in the RM area, Joseph didn’t start out his career intending to work in this field but rather jokes that “RM found me. Shortly after I came to United, I had the opportunity to work on demand forecasting for network planning and RM and everything was interesting to me. Although a mechanical engineer by training, I had studied economics in graduate school, and RM was a natural extension of supply/demand relationships I had learned about, plus had a lot of statistics, forecasting, and operations research.”
One reason Joseph enjoys working in RM is because he can tackle difficult problems. “The easy stuff in RM has been solved over the last 10 to 20 years,” Joseph explains. “More complicated problems remain, and there is always something new that changes landscape to account for.” One of the most exciting problems that Joseph’s team is working on right now is understanding what drives customer behavior, that is, identifying what factors customers consider when they are booking a flight, and incorporating that information into better forecasting and decision making.
Joseph finds that those students who are attracted to revenue management and working for an airline are those who enjoy solving hard challenges using statistics and operations research. “Airlines are made up of a lot of complicated systems that interact with each other. Students who enjoy understanding how complex systems connect and influence each other will get hooked working for an airline and enjoy what they do — just like me!” Joseph explains. Interested in learning more about Joseph? Check out his LinkedIn page.
Joseph adds: “United is an exciting company in a dynamic industry where we can practice operations research on practical and interesting problems like in RM. It is also great to work at a company that aims to do good for the short and long term; for example, even during COVID, United’s leadership team maintained its focus to reduce United’s environmental impact, with a commitment to be 100% green by reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 2050 without relying on traditional offsets.”