Alaska Air Exec Says Technology Makes or Breaks a Merger
Photo Credit: Charu Jain, chief information officer of Alaska Airlines, spoke Thursday with Skift's Madu Unnikrishnan at the Skift Tech Forum. She has been focused on merger integration issues. Skift
Skift Take
Alaska Airlines' merger integration for technology has been nearly flawless. That's great news, but the company has been so focused on it that it hasn't been doing much digital innovation. Let's see if that changes soon.
When Charu Jain joined Alaska Airlines in 2017 as chief information officer a couple of months after it acquired Virgin America, she knew was in for a challenge. Each airline had hundreds of technological platforms for everything from crew scheduling to reservations to maintenance, and all would need to come together.
Jain had been through this before, at United Airlines, where she was a senior managing director of operations technology and technology integration during its merger with Continental Airlines. While at United, she learned a valuable lesson about melding airline technology: It doesn't have to be perfect, but it must work.
"Technology is one of two things that can really make or break a merger," she said Thursday at the Skift Tech Forum in San Francisco. "Success is: Don't end up in the news. That's what we go for."
By most accounts, Alaska succeeded. The airline has had some hiccups merging corporate cultures — former Virgin America employees sometimes complain
