Airline & travel retailing
Modernizing legacy reservation and distribution systems into Offer & Order models that let carriers personalize, retail directly and compete on experience, not just fare.
Madrid · Technology & Design, Airlines at Globant
Lio Fernández
Roca
I build design and technology organizations that turn complex, regulated industries into products and services people actually enjoy using.
Twenty years leading digital product, design and technology teams, from financial services platforms to the reinvention of how airlines sell and serve their passengers. Today I lead Technology & Design for Airlines at Globant, working with carriers moving off decades old reservation systems and into modern, personalized retailing.
Who I am
A technology and design leader who started in the room where the community gets built.
I started in Buenos Aires, where I spent as much time building the local design community as I did building products and services: founding CreativeMornings Buenos Aires and Pulmón, and writing the first UX Design curriculum for DigitalHouse together with industry leaders. That instinct, that a healthy practice needs a healthy community around it, has stayed with everything I've built since.
From there, my work moved into leading digital transformation for financial services organizations: large programs, distributed teams, and the governance needed to keep quality consistent across markets and time zones. Since 2022, that same lens has been pointed at aviation, where I lead Technology & Design for Airlines at Globant, helping carriers rebuild the systems behind personalization, retailing and passenger experience.
Along the way, that work has taken me to over nine countries and into rooms with some of the world's most recognized airlines, banks and consumer brands.
Who I've worked with
Companies and carriers
Airlines, banks and brands I've worked with, directly or through the teams I've led.
Airlines
- British Airways
- Iberia
- Vueling Airlines
- LATAM Airlines
- Copa Airlines
- Southwest Airlines
Banking, consumer & other top brands
- BBVA
- Ferrari
- Olympic Games
- Royal Caribbean
- Santander
- UniCredit
- Telefónica
- Globant
- Orange
- Procter & Gamble
- Intuit
- Verizon
- Avon
Working across
What I do
Where I spend my time
High-performance organizations
Building highly specialized cells within distributed teams, with the operating rhythms, standards and reviews that keep quality consistent as teams and markets scale.
Human plus AI product development
Helping teams move agentic and AI enabled concepts past the demo stage, into workflows, guardrails and escalation paths that hold up in production.
Design culture & talent
A thread that runs through community building (CreativeMornings, Pulmón) and design education, and shows up in how I build teams today.
Publications & speaking
Occasional essays and talks on airlines, product and design leadership
Publications
- The Journey Around the Cabin: Premium Travel's Next Design Frontier Jun 2026
- Personalization at 35,000 Feet Is an Orchestration Challenge, Not a Data One Jun 2026
- Digital Experiences for Airline Customers Nov 2025
- Offers & Orders: Why Airlines Can't Afford to Wait Oct 2025
More on Medium and the Globant blog
Speaking
- IATA O&O Forum Panel session with Iberia's Distribution Futures team on the strategic shift to Offer & Order transformation.
- Think Digital Summit: Hyperpersonalized Experiences with AI Talk on how AI-driven hyperpersonalization is reshaping user experience.
- CES UAI LATAM, 8th International CX Congress Talk on speeding up organizational fitness through native-digital habits.
Open to speaking on digital airlines, modern retailing, and technology & design leadership. Get in touch.
Get in touch
Let's talk.
Open to conversations on airline retailing, design & technology leadership, and building teams that ship in complex, regulated environments.