Skift Tech Forum Preview: United's Chief Digital Exec on Fixing In-Flight Wi-Fi
Skift Take
You probably can't blame airlines for delivering a poor in-flight Wi-Fi experience. As United's chief digital officer Linda Jojo says, it's likely impossible for any provider to give passengers a consistent ground-like experience. People forget sometimes they're traveling more than 500 miles at hour, at more than 30,000 feet.
It's no secret most airlines are slightly behind other industries with their digital strategies. At their core, they're still transportation companies, and they haven't always had the bandwidth – particularly when they were losing money — to invest in the future.
That's changing. Many airlines now consistently make money, and most CEOs know they must invest in digital approaches. Carriers are improving websites and apps, and overhauling their e-commerce strategies so they act more like Amazon and less like decades-old legacy companies.
At the same time, they seek to overhaul antiquated back-end systems, so they're more reliable, because nothing frustrates passengers so much as a system failure that requires an airline to ground all flights. And they're doing what they can to improve in-flight Wi-Fi, which is harder than it sounds, in part because vendors, not airlines, control the systems.
At United Airlines, Linda Jojo is leading this effort. She's United's executive vice presid
