EasyJet creates data science role

The company said that artificial intelligence (AI) will help to improve efficiency, reduce costs and increase revenue and customer satisfaction by improving areas of easyJet’s business such as flight schedules, fleet reliability, in-flight food and drink choice and the airline’s new Flight Club loyalty programme. 

AI will use computer programmes to analyse its huge pools of data such as the 170 million items of food and drink carried annually across all of its flights or the 1.3 billion searches on easyJet.com in the past 12 months. 

Rey-Villaverde (pictured) has been with easyJet since 2006 and has held a number of roles, most recently yield strategy and development manager.

He said: “EasyJet is a large but relatively simple airline: all bookings are made through easyJet.com, we fly one aircraft type and we only fly short haul. This combination of simplicity and scale produces an enormous amount of data. AI can make sense of this huge volume of data and make it work for us, making sense of patterns and trends and help us provide for them.??

“To date analytics has been about diagnostic capability and looking backwards. Now advanced AI is more focused on predictive capability so we can better understand the future and plan for it.”