AGIFORS: The Room That Travels

AGIFORS felt less like a symposium and more like a reunion. You could see it before the first talk: smiles from across the room, people arriving from all over the globe, conversations picking up mid-sentence as though they had paused a year ago. The small talk was about the science, what everyone was working on, and who had the worst jet lag.

This was the 2026 Revenue Management Study Group in Seattle, September 14 to 16, hosted by Alaska Airlines and Hawaiian Airlines. I came as a newcomer, a marketer and storyteller in a room built by operations researchers, and expected to feel a little like a guest at someone else’s family dinner. Instead, the room made space for me, and what surprised me most was how accessible the research felt and how completely it held everyone’s attention from the first talk to the last.

Six decades of showing up

The reunion feeling makes more sense once you know how AGIFORS started. In 1960, six airline operations researchers from Air France, BEA, KLM, Sabena, Swissair and Trans Canada met at the second international operations research conference in Aix-en-Provence, France. Their informal discussions led to a committee, and the following year to a symposium on operations research in the airline industry in Spring Valley, New York. AGIFORS grew from that meeting.

The problems on the table would still sound familiar today. At that first symposium, American Airlines researchers presented work on seat sharing, crew scheduling and maintenance reliability. Sixty-five years later, crew, operations, scheduling and revenue management each still have study groups of their own, while maintenance has its own special session. AGIFORS was formed as the airline group of the International Federation of Operational Research Societies, and membership carries no dues. From the beginning, it has been a community people participate in because they want to be there.

Some of the industry’s most consequential ideas were first shared there. In October 1972, Ken Littlewood of BOAC presented “Forecasting and control of passenger bookings” at the 12th symposium. His argument was deceptively simple: optimize the revenue of the flight rather than simply the number of passengers carried. It became foundational to modern airline revenue management.

The community also keeps its own memory. Fellows are recognized for sustained contribution over many years. The Anna Valicek Medal brings graduate students to the symposium to present original research, while the Ken Wang Scholars Program supports students early in their careers. In 2010, the 50th Annual Symposium was held in Juan-les-Pins in southern France, returning AGIFORS to the region where its story had begun half a century earlier.

That continuity was visible in Seattle. Gabriel Cedraz Diniz, a Georgia Tech PhD student and 2024 Ken Wang Scholar, stood at the front of the room presenting “Hybrid Framework for Price Sensitivity and Demand Estimation,” research separating the problem of estimating customer price sensitivity from the broader demand and capacity-control questions revenue management systems are asked to solve. He was one of the first three Georgia Tech students named to the Ken Wang Scholars program. Watching that progression play out in the room, the distance between student and veteran felt unusually small.

Why the room listened

What stayed with me most was how seriously the room listened. This was not polite attention. People leaned into the work, asked precise questions, challenged assumptions and stayed with the science even when the work was unfinished. Academic research was not treated as something adjacent to the “real” sessions. It was the work.

That seriousness did not make the room rigid. Presenters were willing to show their methods, expose assumptions and talk openly about where something was holding up and where it was not. The questions afterward reflected the same spirit. They rarely felt like a panel testing the presenter; they felt more like colleagues testing the thinking together.

There was expertise everywhere in the room, but very little performance of expertise. Michael Wittman of Amadeus and Daniel Fry of Alaska Airlines, co-chairs of the AGIFORS Revenue Management and Distribution Study Group, were part of that texture rather than apart from it. They were not simply running a program. They were participating in the same exchange of ideas, questions and work as everyone else.

Trust is part of the infrastructure

There are gatherings built around access, visibility or scale. AGIFORS feels built around something older and harder to manufacture: trust earned over time. Competitors put unfinished work in front of one another, researchers bring ideas that are still being tested, and PhD students stand up in front of people who helped shape the field they are entering.

The tools have changed dramatically since six airline researchers met in France in 1960, but the underlying behavior has not. Someone brings a hard problem into the room, shows the thinking behind it and gives other people permission to challenge it. That kind of exchange requires confidence in the work, but just as importantly, confidence in the people receiving it.

AGIFORS has spent more than six decades becoming that kind of place. The location changes, often crossing countries and continents, but the community carries its history with it. People return with new work, test their thinking in front of one another and make space for the people just arriving.

As a first-timer, I did not follow every model or every method. But the thing I understood most clearly had less to do with the science itself than with the culture around it: the trust in the room had been built over decades, and everyone there seemed to understand their part in carrying it forward.