The Lifetime Route to AGIFORS

Daniel Fry has been part of AGIFORS for eleven years, and one could reasonably argue he has been making his way there since he was two.

His mother was a travel agent in a town of eleven thousand people in the middle of the Great Plains. He grew up working for his mom, filing paper tickets into ticket jackets for twenty-five cents an hour. His family took a trip every year because his parents believed travel was valuable enough to justify the expense. As Fry reached adulthood, he realized travel was a way to gain perspective on the world outside his small town. His first flight to Shanghai was in 2003. In 2015, he returned.

That second trip was for AGIFORS. Fry was completing his dissertation at MIT under Peter Belobaba on demand-driven dispatch, and Belobaba encouraged him to present it at the RM Study Group meeting that year, in Shanghai. Fry’s first thought was that he liked to travel and hadn’t been back to China in twelve years, so this would be fun. What he experienced was much more than that. He presented his research to a room of roughly two hundred people who, in his words, “genuinely loved the work they did”. They saw the value in doing the science together, sharing their findings, and learning from each other. It was, he said, his first sense that this was both “a scientific community and a community of friends.” He gave the Shanghai presentation through an interpreter, and it was entertaining to realize that someone would have to work out, in real time, how to communicate “EMSR critical value” in Mandarin.

The paper itself, titled Revenue Management and Demand Driven Dispatch, modeled two competing airlines with different hub structures, one in Minneapolis and one in Dallas–Fort Worth, to test how scheduling and revenue management interact when neither is optimized in isolation. That instinct, to bridge two functions that are usually treated as separate disciplines, tracks back to the program he was in at MIT, which combined economics, operations research (OR), and aerospace engineering. The program put its students in direct contact with more than ten airlines during the research itself.

Ten years later, Fry’s research had moved from aircraft scheduling to overbooking, but the underlying theme hadn’t changed. His 2025 paper, The Value of Information in Airline Overbooking started from a conversation with another AGIFORS presenter about a simple idea: better data makes passengers better off, not just the airline. A more accurate no-show forecast lets an airline overbook more aggressively and at the same time deny boarding to fewer passengers. Selling more seats on the same aircraft also means more inventory moving at lower prices, which benefits the traveler as much as the carrier. Fry’s framing borrows directly from welfare economics, a discipline about producer and consumer benefit that revenue management doesn’t traditionally consider.

Asked how he knows when a research question is ready to become a paper, Fry’s answer was logical: “Does the research that we’ve done answer the question? And is it simple enough that it could be put into practice?” He applies the same test to his own team’s daily work: something is considered done when it’s being used.

Fry has co-chaired the Revenue Management Study Group with Mike Wittman for three years, work he describes as a “decent chunk” of hours on top of his full-time job and growing family. He is careful to point out he’s not unusual in this; people have chaired other AGIFORS study groups, or served as treasurer or president, for a decade or more, donating what adds up to thousands of hours of time. Fry credits AGIFORS’s continued relevance to exactly this kind of personal investment; twenty to thirty airlines send delegates most years, which he takes as evidence that airline leadership believes the research pays for itself. Alaska Air Group, where he works, has supported his participation throughout his career on what he describes as a simple exchange: the company sends him, he learns, and what he learns gets put into practice at his airline.

Fry is a firm believer that the in-person meetings matter deeply in an industry that runs on video calls. “Roughly sixty percent of communication is nonverbal,” he noted, citing the commonly used estimate, and a live room allows for interruption during a presentation (both the productive and the unproductive kind). Debate conducted face to face, among people who already trust and respect each other, gets to a defensible answer faster than the same argument conducted over email.

His advice to someone attending their first RM Study Group meeting is not about which session to prioritize, it’s to talk to people. Coffee conversations, lunch conversations, the dinner cruise on Lake Union this year, all count as research time in his view, not downtime around the research. Ask questions rather than sit through the material passively, then go back to your own airline already thinking about how to apply what you learn.

Sixty-five years of a shared archive, volunteer-chaired study groups, and a meeting that puts dissertations from MIT next to production systems from tech startups, Alaska Air Group, and Turkish Technology is not happenstance. It’s an intentional choice a few thousand people, one meeting at a time, have kept making since 1960. The overbooking model an airline runs today, the forecasting logic behind it, the willingness-to-pay estimation underneath a fare—all of it at some point passed through a room like the one Fry described before it became infrastructure.

Daniel Fry may have gotten his start filling ticket jackets for twenty-five cents an hour, but his curiosity and intentionality have carried him well beyond. He says he likes to find things that appear to be in contradiction and that he “can’t stop thinking about it” until he has figured out how to resolve the contradiction. Studying under Peter Belobaba at MIT, presenting at AGIFORS, and leading Revenue Strategy and Optimization at Alaska Airlines seems like the natural progression for someone with a mindset like that.