Chris LaColla

What I work on

Profit-and-loss ownership on the commercial side of travel: Pacific pricing at United, a $2B ancillary portfolio at Spirit, a $700M direct digital channel at MSC Cruises.

Running those meant owning the whole surface at once. Product, UX, analytics, optimization and content reported into the same number, so the tradeoff between a pricing decision and a conversion decision got settled in one place instead of argued across three departments. At United it also meant leading nine analysts across Chicago, Tokyo and Hong Kong against markets generating more than $2B.

Ancillary revenue is where I go deepest: bags, seats, bundles and upgrades on an airline, drinks and excursions and dining on a ship. It carries a lot of the margin and usually gets less rigor than the ticket, because it is an awkward sales motion that sits between revenue management, digital and marketing and belongs cleanly to none of them. Doing it well means building products that did not exist and then pricing and packaging them. At Spirit that meant $200M a year in targeted bundles, a $20M-plus annual stream from seat inventory that had been flying empty, and premium upgrade bidding scaled past $10M.

Around it sits offer construction, conversion, loyalty design, and the discovery layer that now decides whether any of it is seen at all. That last one is where most of my attention goes now.

What I write about

I publish continuously on the commercial side of travel. The subjects it keeps returning to:

• Applied AIHow answer engines summarize and cite operators, what brand chat widgets get wrong, and what happens when a platform's AI writes your brand story before you do.
• Pricing and revenue architectureBooking windows collapsing under pacing models, committed forward books that cannot be repriced, seat-mandate regulation that sharpens the pricing it targets, and the real unit economics of a loyalty giveaway.
• Distribution and the direct channelCard issuers building travel brands that compete with airlines, portfolio recapture when a destination goes dark, and what an operator trades away for an OTA's reach.
• Travel technologyWhy the scattered-tabs problem does not imply the product everyone builds for it, and where itinerary tools resolve logistics while leaving the decision untouched.

Longer arguments become working papers, each published in full with its sources and a set of figures. The current set covers the consideration window outliving browser-resident identity, booking windows diverging in opposite directions across hotels and cruise, why conversational interfaces underperform the booking flows they are replacing, and what a model says about an operator when it assembles an answer without them.

Some of it runs elsewhere. The rising cost of ambiguity in cruise branding ran in Cruise Weekly in January 2026, on why an explicit audience definition is what lets an AI system surface a cruise brand to the people it actually serves.