Chief executive Johan Lundgren said the carrier had three priorities: to “increase holiday bookings”; increase its number of business passengers from the current 13 million; and inspire loyalty “underpinned by data”.
He told the Aviation Festival in London: “Data will be a game changer in this industry. EasyJet has billions of data points.”
He said data would reduce costs, enhance revenue and allow the airline “to engage with customers in a completely different way”.
An example would be to permit auxiliary sales “before the [flight] transaction, rather than after”.
“These are the types of things I think the industry has not been very advanced in at all,” said Lundgren.
“We want to become the most data-driven airline in the world.”
Lundgren was speaking as easyJet added Singapore Airlines to its Worldwide by easyJet global connection system at Milan Malpensa and Berlin Tegel. The deal takes the number of partnerships to 10.
Lundgren said Worldwide was profitable and called it “a great innovation”. “We have 10 airlines now. More than half of our network enables our customers to connect with long-haul airlines,” he said.
He added 70% of connecting customers changed to a long-haul airline and the remainder to another easyJet flight.
Lundgren said he was still interested in a deal to buy all or some of Alitalia, but would only progress it if the Italian carrier’s short-haul network complemented easyJet’s, if it fitted operationally and “made common sense”.
He said there was room for more consolidation in Europe, where the four biggest carriers control less than 50% of the market, compared with 80% in the US.
But he said the US carriers had all been fighting in the same market and added: “Will we ever get to the US situation? I don’t think so.”
