Which loyalty experts can you hear at World Aviation Festival, Lisbon, next month?

If you work in the airline or travel loyalty sectors, World Aviation Festival in Lisbon should be on your radar for next month.

Taking place from 26th to 28th September at FIL (Lisbon Exhibition and Congress Centre), it is the best place this year to hear from senior management at the world’s leading airline groups. Over 5,000 attendees will listen to over 500 speakers.

World Aviation Festival also has an airline loyalty track to its conference programme. Whilst the organisers don’t make a big deal of it, I have been to the last two events and – if carved out as a separate loyalty event on its own – it would probably be the largest airline loyalty conference in Europe this year.

Head for Points is the Official Loyalty Media Partner for the event and will be around over the three days.

Last week we ran this article looking at the C-suite aviation leaders who will be speaking at WAF.

Today I want to take a look at the airline loyalty experts who will be presenting.

Who is speaking at the World Aviation Festival loyalty sessions?

The loyalty sessions take place on 27th and 28th September, so you would only need a 2-day ticket to attend this part of WAF.

Whilst HfP is focusing on the Airline Loyalty conference track, there are also dedicated tracks for Air Retail, Aviation IT, Aviation Marketing and Aviation Payments plus a Start-Up Summit, Green Skies sessions and the World Low Cost Airlines Congress.

You can see the full agenda here. Filter by ‘Loyalty’ to just see the airline loyalty sessions.

Highlights include:

• a one-to-one interview with Nejib Ben-Khedher, Divisional Senior Vice President Skywards at Emirates – we published our own interview with Nejib earlier this year and he’s an interesting speaker

• Luc Bondar, President of United Mileage Plus, is giving a speech on ‘The Business of Loyalty Unleashed’

• Anthony Woodman, Vice President Customer Journeys and Reward at Virgin Atlantic – who some of you will have met at our summer party – is speaking on ‘Why Loyalty Matters: Exploring why Loyalty is crucial to this industry, and how this understanding creates a better relationship with all passengers’

• a panel on ‘How can loyalty programs excel while not only incentivizing unsustainable passenger behaviour?’ which includes Ben Lipsey, SVP Customer Loyalty at Air France KLM and Olivia Wasniewski who runs Eurobonus at Scandinavian Airlines

• a session on ‘Unlocking the potential of loyalty currency retailing’, which includes participation from Emirates

Other panels include loyalty specialists from Aegean, airBaltic, Garuda Indonesia, Lufthansa and Pegasus as well as contributors from industry suppliers.

How to attend World Aviation Festival

If you want to join, meet and network with 5,000 other attendees, as Official Loyalty Media Partner HfP readers can get a 25% discount on a World Aviation Festival pass.

The standard price is €2,695 for the full three days – including the summit sessions on the 26th – or €2,295 for a Day 2 and Day 3 conference and exhibition pass. Prices rise by €200 from 1st September.

These are reduced to €2,020 and €1,720 respectively using our POINTS25 code.

Group discounts are available for multiple guests from the same organisation.

You can book your ticket here. The main WAF website is here.

See you in Lisbon!