An expert in airline pricing, fare architecture, and global distribution systems talks about how pricing is changing in aviation and what passengers don’t really notice.
While passengers worry about data privacy, the world’s largest airports are accelerating their rollout of biometric technology. In 2026, the TSA announced a large-scale expansion of its Touchless ID system at US airports ahead of the World Cup: by summer, facial recognition should be running at 65 airports across the country. Europe, meanwhile, is rolling out its Entry/Exit System (EES), which replaces traditional passport control with biometric registration of travelers. Airlines are pushing the same idea under the label of “seamless travel”, moving passengers from check-in to boarding with almost no documents. But the less a passenger notices the system, the more complex its architecture becomes underneath. Behind every boarding pass, route, and price sit international standards, global distribution systems, and the people who design the logic of global aviation long before anyone clicks “Buy ticket”.
Dina Zhumassultanova is one of those people. An expert in airline pricing, fare architecture, and global distribution, she specializes in ATPCO fare systems at Qanot Sharq Airlines and consults for Georgian Airways. She led the integration of airlines into global sales systems that can issue tickets in more than 100 countries, and holds Kazakhstan’s state award “Excellent of the Tourism Industry”. In 2026 she also joined the expert council of the National Business Award, judging projects in technological innovation, digital transformation, and strategic business development. We asked her how this invisible side of aviation actually works.
Dina, thanks for joining us. The industry is increasingly talking about “seamless travel”, where passengers move through the airport by their face rather than their documents. How much is that actually changing aviation from the inside?
In reality, the passenger sees only the final result of processes that have been running inside the aviation system for years. When people talk about biometrics today, it can feel like a brand-new revolution. But aviation has worked as a global digital infrastructure for a long time; that complexity was simply hidden from the passenger. Behind a single ordinary ticket sit international IATA standards, global booking systems, fare publications, interline agreements, and settlement mechanisms. The passenger notices almost none of it, even as the system underneath keeps growing more complex.
You came into aviation through hospitality, working at Jumeirah in Dubai and Rixos in Almaty, then through tourism. Why did the internal logic of airlines start to interest you?
Because I’ve always wanted to understand how the system works. Hospitality is a serious school. It teaches you to feel the level of service, to read what a person expects, and to see that the small details matter as much as the big decisions. That shapes how you approach work in general. Then I moved into tourism, and that’s the stage that led me toward aviation. In tourism you work not just with a service but with routes, logistics, restrictions, tickets, transfers, and international rules.
When I became director of the Shakh Travel branch in Astana (the parent company of Aviata, now known as Freedom Travel), the scope of the work grew much wider. We worked with corporate clients, complex logistics, and high-stakes international trips and delegations. I served OSCE delegations, which is a completely different level of responsibility: everything has to be accurate, calm, and professional. That was when I first realized I was drawn not to the ticket as a finished product, but to the system behind it. I kept wondering why one fare can be changed and another cannot. Why is a price the same today and different tomorrow? Why does the whole system work the way it does?
In 2016 you received Kazakhstan’s state award, “Excellent of the Tourism Industry”. By then you’d already moved from hospitality into tourism. What did that recognition mean to you, and did the experience help in your later work with airlines?
For me, the award confirmed that the work I’d done in tourism and hospitality had paid off. I came to aviation not from a technical background, but through understanding the customer, the route, the service, and the whole logic of travel. That experience proved useful later. When you deal with fares and international distribution, you have to understand both the airline’s internal processes and the passenger’s entire journey. So the knowledge I gained in tourism became a solid foundation for working in aviation.
You describe a clear system inside airlines, but to most passengers the ticket price looks random. It can change daily, even hourly. How much of that price is actually controlled by the system?
It’s completely controlled by the system. In aviation, a ticket price is never just a number; it’s the result of several layers of logic. First, a person designs the fare architecture: the rules, restrictions, booking classes, refund and exchange conditions, seasonality, and sales conditions. Then the revenue management system takes over, analyzing demand, flight load, the number of seats, and other parameters. So when a passenger sees that a ticket has doubled in price, it isn’t chaos. It’s the result of a model that was built in advance.
You work with ATPCO, the system airlines use to publish fares worldwide. There are well-known cases where a single mistake in a fare publication put business-class seats on sale at economy prices, with losses running into the millions. How fragile is the system, and what does the work of the specialist responsible for getting it right actually look like?
Those cases happened across world aviation, which is exactly why working with ATPCO carries such a high level of responsibility. Through this system, fares, rules, and ticketing conditions are published and then become available to global booking systems everywhere. If an error gets into a publication, it stops being one airline’s local problem. It can scale instantly to dozens of markets and thousands of agencies. That’s why a specialist working with fares has to think ahead about how a fare will behave across different scenarios.
I’ve never had a situation like that, and not because you can rely on luck here. The opposite: discipline develops fast in this work. You know that anything you publish can be live around the world in an instant, so you keep checking the logic, weighing the consequences, and looking at the system more broadly than the single task in front of you. That’s probably the difference between technical execution and real expertise. In aviation, it isn’t enough to simply build a fare. You need to know in advance how it will behave in the global sales system, where mistakes get expensive fast.
Cases like that raise the question of how fare-setting differs from country to country. You’ve worked with airlines in Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, and Georgia. Are there still national rules of the game in aviation today?
On the commercial and fare side, aviation is highly globalized. In terms of international standards, an airline in Central Asia, Europe, or the US operates inside one large system: IATA, ATPCO, global distribution systems, and settlement mechanisms. The differences show up in strategy. One carrier works demand more aggressively, another builds its route network differently, a third bets on a particular segment of passengers. But the foundation is the same for everyone.
This year your expertise earned you a place on the expert council of the National Business Award. The organizers singled out your work integrating airlines into international distribution systems and global sales architecture. What did you take away from the judging?
I was asked to evaluate projects in technological innovation and digital transformation. It was serious work. When you assess projects at that level, what matters isn’t a polished presentation but the foundation of the solution. We looked at each project’s scale, sustainability, industry impact, and room to grow. Sometimes the loudest projects turned out to be the weakest in architecture, while quieter-looking ones held far more potential. It was valuable for me, if only for the exchange of ideas with colleagues and other experts in the field.
Drawing on your work and your time judging, how do you see the next stage of the industry’s development?
I think passengers will see less and less of the system itself. Travel will keep getting more invisible: fewer documents, fewer manual steps, fewer barriers between a person and their trip. At the same time, the infrastructure underneath will only get more complex. That’s why the next round of competition in aviation won’t be won on attractive interfaces, but on the quality of the architecture, the part that stays invisible to the passenger yet shapes their entire journey.
