Book excerpt: Technology is changing expectations in the airline industry. Passengers want to be in control, and they expect airlines to become solution providers and aggregators of value, to provide them with personalized services. Airline employees expect to be given the tools to do their jobs and to meet passenger expectations. Airline executives expect to make returns that are reasonable and relatively stable through business cycles. All of these expectations can be met by airlines through the effective and efficient leveraging of information and technology, to shift from being operations- and product-centric to becoming customer-centric and dramatically improving the overall passenger travel experience throughout the travel cycle. In this new book by world-renowned airline expert Nawal K. Taneja, the 7th in a series with Ashgate, the author explores and explains the game-changing opportunities presented to the industry by new-generation information and technology. He shows how information and technology can now drive, not just enable, an airline's strategy to become truly customer-centric at a personalized level, while at the same time enabling the operator to reduce costs, enhance revenues, reduce risks and become much more flexible and agile by better managing complexity.