Thomas Fiig is director and chief scientist at Amadeus. Shortly after receiving his doctoral degree in theoretical physics from the Technical University of Denmark, Thomas joined the department for revenue management development at Scandinavian Airlines System (SAS). In 2013, Thomas joined Amadeus.
Thomas was one of the first participants of the MIT PODS consortium and has enjoyed “meeting a lot of exciting people” and being part of the RM community for more than two decades. Thomas enjoys working in RM because “despite years of research and advancement in the RM science there are still plenty of problems unsolved. RM is never boring — new challenges arise constantly. Just think of the last couple of years: dynamic pricing; the impact of the Covid pandemic; dynamic offer creation. This will for sure keep us occupied for many years.”
“The other driver we can mention is the machine learning revolution. We have seen ML perform wonders with AlphaGo, AlphaFold, DALLE-2, and lately ChatGPT. How will this technology impact RM?”
“The final thing — the RM system does not live in isolation. In an airline, the RM department interacts with other commercial departures such as network planning, distribution, pricing, loyalty, group sales, etc. Thus we need to take an end-to-end view when designing our RM systems.”
For students interested in pursuing a career in RM, Thomas believes that “the most important thing is attitude” and that “you don’t have to be an expert — we can train you on the things you need to know, but we can’t train you for attitude.” Those who have a curious mind, are tenacious and passionate about the subject area, and not afraid to learn new things are those that Thomas finds are most likely to succeed.
Interested in learning more about Thomas? Check out his LinkedIn page. But one fact you won’t find about Thomas online is that he used to be a member of an amateur rocket cub and launched real rockets!