Florian Martin is Head of Commercial Offer Methods and Automation at the Lufthansa Group and is based in Swiss Airlines’ headquarters in Zurich.
Florian’s foray into revenue management arose the first day he started as a doctoral student at the Vienna University of Economics and Business and learned that it was also the last day of the professor who had hired him because the professor had retired! This ended up being a great opportunity for Florian to explore potential topics on his own. He saw revenue management as an area in which he could combine his prior studies in studies in finance, economics, demand modeling, and scheduling without necessarily becoming a deep expert in any one of those particular topics.
One project that Florian is excited to be working on is an autonomous self-correcting system he is helping create that would take output from their traditional RM system and automatically trigger alerts and/or provide adjustment recommendations to the demand forecasts and product availabilities. Florian envisions a future of revenue management in which “we can do what many people think we can already do which is offer personalized price quotes [to individual consumers].” The math problem to do this is quite complex, Florian explains, and we’ll likely need to be creative in how we combine combinatorial network problems with dynamic problems and customer choice models.
For students interested in pursuing careers in revenue management, Florian encourages them to take advantage of their time at the university to gain exposure to different theories as “this is the only chance you are going to have to really dig into and understand these fundamentals.” .
Interested in learning more about Florian? Check out his LinkedIn page. But one fact you won’t see about Florian online is that one time, his machine learning application was so good that it improved revenue by raising prices but at the cost of dropping load factors to a point that airports became concerned and called headquarters to ask what happened to all of the passengers!