Daniel Fry is senior manager of commercial strategy and experimentation at Alaska Airlines. Daniel has always been obsessed with the airline industry. As a child, Daniel would go to work with his mother who was a travel agent and play in the back room with paper tickets. One day, he even cried in daycare [until they sent him home] because they didn’t have a toy plane! This early love for aviation led Daniel to pursue an undergraduate degree in math and economics and MS in transportation at MIT where he worked with Peter Belobaba.
Daniel started his career at Alaska in RM and lead the overhaul of Alaska’s fare structures and migration of demand history from Virgin America’s RM system into Alaska’s. “What I like about RM is that it’s always dynamic and changing and the perfect mix of theory and practice” he explains. “Another perk of working at an airline is that you get real feedback. That is, you come up with an idea, implement it, see how it works out in the open, and get that feedback so you can then iterate and come up with something even better.”
Daniel envisions a future of RM in which “the product and price we offer to a guest is going to be less commoditized and that instead of thinking about what price to offer for a flight, we think about the whole experience of taking a trip.”
Daniel recommends that students interested in RM pursue an internship and be prepared to “put your seatbelt on because the industry is turbulent. I’ve been in the industry for eight years and haven’t had a normal or boring year yet. I’ve worked through a recession, hurricanes, fires, floods, a merger, and a pandemic. There is always a new problem to solve.”
Interested in learning more about Daniel? Check out his LinkedIn page. One fact about Daniel you won’t find online is that on his first weekend working for Alaska, he traveled to Sitka, Juneau, Anchorage, Fairbanks, Portland, Spokane and back to Seattle all within 24 hours. He even had time to leave a few of these airports and go for a coastal hike, visit a fishery, and see a Native American museum in Sitka, as well as have a reindeer omelet in Anchorage. “Only when you work for an airline can you do crazy trips like this.”