The Future Comes With A Change Fee
When assumptions become infrastructure, changing direction comes at a price.
In the early days of inflight connectivity, airlines were trying to work out what a connected cabin should actually look like. One idea that gained traction across the industry was the walled garden, an airline-curated environment of content, shopping, destination information and partner offers designed to keep passengers within a controlled digital experience.
At the time, the concept made sense. Connectivity was new, passenger behavior was still evolving and nobody really knew how people would use the internet once it became available in the air.
What became clear over time was that once passengers were connected, they tended to go where they already lived online, to their own apps, messages, services and content. As connectivity improved, Wi-Fi became more widely available and expectations changed, the value of keeping passengers inside a tightly controlled environment became harder to sustain.
The walled garden was built around one set of assumptions about passenger behavior. Reality evolved differently.
It was not the only bet of its time. For more than a decade, IFEC strategy has been guided by assumptions about consumer technology, digital behavior and the direction in which passengers were expected to move. With the benefit of hindsight, I believe some of those assumptions now look very different, while long product investment cycles have made others expensive to reverse.
What we thought we knew
None of this thinking was unreasonable at the time. Much of it was based on what we could see happening in consumer electronics, mobile, streaming and e-commerce, combined with our expectations of what passengers would eventually want onboard.
We were witnessing extraordinary adoption rates, rapid shifts in consumer behavior and technologies that had once seemed almost Star Trek-esque suddenly becoming everyday tools. Like most industries, aviation also absorbed some of the hype. As more airlines began making similar strategic bets based on the same external signals, certain ideas started to look like established industry wisdom.
Those ideas were built into strategies, product roadmaps and investment decisions: personalization, passenger engagement, ancillary revenue, bring-your-own-device, streaming, second-screen behavior, the role of the seatback screen and the broader expectation that passengers would behave onboard much as they did on the ground.
Fifteen years later, the questions are different. What did we think passengers would do? What did they actually do? Which expectations never materialized as we anticipated? And which beliefs are we still carrying forward simply because they became embedded in the way the industry thinks and operates?
What stepping away taught me
Answering those questions honestly has been easier from a distance. It has been five years since I left an airline role with direct accountability for IFEC strategy and investment decisions across a large and diverse fleet. I have remained deeply involved across the ecosystem since, but what changed is ownership.
That distance has been valuable, because I know the thinking behind those decisions, and I can now return to them with a different lens after spending time this year working outside of aviation on application development, workflow automation, digital solutions and accessibility, in industries with some similarities and others at the other end of the scale.
One lesson that stood out was around mobile apps. Some organizations I came across had been pitched costly mobile solutions, which, in my mind, were disproportionate to the problem they were trying to solve or the utility they wanted to offer. Sensor Tower's State of Mobile 2026 report found that people use 10 unique apps per day on average. Attention is concentrated. An app used once or twice a year has to compete with the handful people open every day, and most will not win that contest. For many businesses, a well-designed web experience with a home screen shortcut may serve customers far better.
Where the change fee comes in
Aviation's investment and implementation cycles are long. Even when an assumption begins to look less certain, it may already be embedded in product architecture, contracts, supplier roadmaps, certification plans, business cases and internal commitments. At that point, changing direction is no longer a matter of changing your mind. Money, organizational effort and reputational capital are tied to the original strategy, and teams may have spent years explaining, defending and building around it.
So, some ideas continue to be developed and expanded not because the original rationale remains valid, but because reversing course is expensive, disruptive and difficult to justify internally.
The process is getting faster and tools are getting smarter, but implementation for many things in aircraft interiors still lags behind the speed of implementation on the ground. Every change can introduce complexity and cost that must compete with everything else on the airline's wish list. That is not unique to aviation, but our timelines make the effect more visible. A strategy conceived years earlier may still be shaping what is being installed today. By the time the evidence changes, the investment may already be committed.
Did we overthink some of it?
It’s fair to ask whether, in some areas, we overcomplicated the passenger experience. We were trying to create experiences that would stay relevant across long aircraft lifecycles, multiple fleet types and countless configurations. In doing so, we sometimes built layers of complexity around experiences that ultimately needed something much simpler.
Many strategies delivered real value with clever architecture, and some are now fundamental to the passenger experience. But in certain cases the outcome did not match the scale of the expectation, while the complexity, cost, integration effort and operational burden remained. Much of that complexity originated in the airline environment itself, through fleet diversity, airline-specific requirements, certification constraints and the challenge of integrating new ideas into systems designed to remain in service for many years.
American Airlines' return to seatback IFE is a useful example. At the time American leaned into BYOD, seatback IFE technology had real limitations while passenger devices were improving extraordinarily quickly. The decision represented a significant strategic bet, but I could see how the business case made sense based on what we knew at the time. What has since changed is the seatback technology itself, with lighter hardware, better displays, more capable platforms and connectivity integration. American can now re-enter embedded IFE at a materially different technology point, with less legacy embedded IFE to contend with. Dealing with legacy is a whole subject on its own, and until you have found yourself in that situation, making the decisions and trade-offs, it is hard to truly understand the complexity and challenges it brings. The lesson here is not that one strategy was right and the other wrong. The right answer moves with the pace of technology, passenger expectations and the wider economic climate, but airlines do not always have the time, money or agility to test every assumption before making a long-term decision. At some point, the assumptions are made, the business case is approved and the organization has to move forward.
Personalization tells a similar story. The industry spent years assuming passengers would want increasingly personalized onboard experiences. Some demand exists, but the value appears to be more conditional than we may have originally assumed. It depends on relevance, context, willingness to share data and, when executed well, whether it actually improves the passenger experience.
Looking back, were we always clear about the difference between what was possible and what passengers actually valued? Did we get a little gimmicky at times? Some of what did not live up to expectation may have been possible, but not valued in the way we had hoped.
The passenger was learning too
In retrospect, it is easy to say we should simply have asked passengers what they wanted, but they were learning at the same time we were. They were encountering new devices, interfaces, ways of consuming media and levels of connectivity almost in real time in a way the world had never experienced. Could they have reasonably told us what they would value in experiences that they had never had? Imaginations ran wild, but in reality budgets and priorities were tamed.
We were developing against a moving target. We were developing products while passenger expectations were still forming and shifting with every new consumer technology release. That makes forecasting difficult, which also makes humility essential.
Déjà vu, at AI speed
AI brings another major technology cycle, arriving at extraordinary speed. Once again, aviation is looking for signals about what passengers will expect and what the technology should enable, both in and outside the cabin.
The risk is exactly the same one we faced before, mistaking adoption elsewhere for evidence of onboard value. A capability can become commonplace on the ground without becoming useful, desirable or commercially meaningful in the cabin. It is the walled garden question again. Will passengers use what we build, or go where they already are? And as personal AI keeps advancing at its current pace, what role does that leave for the airline's own AI? That is a question I think the industry needs to answer before it builds, and not after.
Accessibility, which is always at the forefront of my mind, raises a different kind of question. AI is making captioning, audio description and translation faster and more affordable than ever before. For passengers who are deaf or hard of hearing, blind or low vision, or simply traveling in a language they do not speak, the need is real and the potential is significant. But potential is not the same as value delivered. The question is not whether it solves a genuine problem, because it clearly does. It is whether it can be delivered in a way that actually works for them onboard.
The harder questions need asking earlier in the process. What problem is the airline actually trying to solve? Can it operationalize what it builds effectively? And given our timelines, what happens if the thinking behind the strategy changes before the product reaches the aircraft? That last question is the one we asked least often last time, and it is the one that determines the size of the change fee for the future.
Now we have the evidence
We now have something we did not have when those original decisions were made, and that is fifteen years of actual data and experience. Together they show us what changes with technology and what remains fundamental to how people behave, what they value and what they are willing to do. Technology moves quickly, yet some human behaviors are remarkably persistent.
None of this diminishes the work that was done, but it gives us the chance to learn from it before the next cycle's assumptions harden into infrastructure. Because the future will always come with a change fee, the only question is how much of it we choose to pay.
Disclaimer : The views expressed in this article are those of the author and IFECtiv, and reflects industry observations, analysis and experiences. References to airlines, suppliers, technologies and past strategies are provided for discussion and illustrative purposes only and should not be interpreted as representing the views of any current or former employer, client or other organization. Any forward-looking observations are opinion, not prediction, and may change as technology, passenger behavior and market conditions evolve.