The airline industry is still recovering from the COVID-19 pandemic, with passenger preferences forever changed and parallel industry trends accelerated by half a decade. How airlines build back from this disruption will decide the winners and the losers in an ever-changed travel landscape.

To successfully react to these changes and build for the new trends of sustainability, personalization, and modern payment mechanisms, airlines need to build a foundation that enables them to experiment rapidly and scale.

Delivering the customer experience needed in an increasingly competitive landscape can't be achieved with the technical debt found in legacy systems after industry-wide underinvestment in digital. Modernizing to adopt a modern cloud (i.e. Serverless) will provide the foundation needed, but the strategy to migrate the workload will be the critical decider of success. Moving away from a "big bang" all-or-nothing migration approach and adopting a progressive migration strategy is essential.

The Minimum Viable Migration (MVM) framework provides the approach, tools, and techniques to move to the modern cloud in a series of iterative vertical slices shipped to production. The emergence of Microfrontends and Edge Compute further support achieving an MVM approach.

To catch up with competitors it is essential to prioritize modernizing the areas of the system with the most significant experimentation potential and greatest impact on the customer experience. For airlines this typically involves prioritising the e-commerce function. Going more granular specific areas of the booking flow and payment mechanism can be modernized and released first.