About Iceland Air
Icelandair is one of Europe's most recognized airlines, built around a distinctive hub-and-spoke model connecting North America and Europe through Reykjavik. For decades, it has been a pioneer of the transatlantic stopover concept — inviting travelers to experience Iceland en route between continents. Today, Icelandair operates across commercial, operational, and customer experience functions, each powered by data that spans bookings, pricing, crew management, maintenance, and beyond.
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About Icelandair
Icelandair is one of Europe's most recognized airlines, built around a distinctive hub-and-spoke model connecting North America and Europe through Reykjavik. For decades, it has been a pioneer of the transatlantic stopover concept — inviting travelers to experience Iceland en route between continents. Today, Icelandair operates across commercial, operational, and customer experience functions, each powered by data that spans bookings, pricing, crew management, maintenance, and beyond.
The Data Landscape at Icelandair
Data is at the heart of every major decision at Icelandair — from the executive committee setting long-term strategy to contact center agents handling real-time customer calls. The airline operates a decentralized data model, with a central data engineering team providing the foundational infrastructure and domain-specific analyst squads embedded within commercial, operational, financial planning, and crew management functions.
Icelandair's data sources span the full breadth of airline operations:
PNR (Passenger Name Record) data for bookings and customer profiles
Marketing and attribution data from Google Analytics and paid social
Operational data from Amadeus (streamed via Kafka) for commercial decisions
Survey data from Qualtrics for NPS and customer experience measurement
HR, financial, and crew scheduling data from internal systems
More than 300 applications and vendor systems ingested in total
All of this data flows into Icelandair's Databricks data lakehouse, where it is transformed using dbt and surfaced through Power BI reports that teams across the organization rely on daily.
From Legacy Infrastructure to the Cloud
When Jóhann Valur Sævarsson, Director of Enterprise Architecture, joined Icelandair in 2021, the journey away from legacy technology was already underway — but it was far from complete. The airline had operated on a 20-year-old Oracle data warehouse, IBM and Cognos BI tooling, and a WebMethods-based integration platform. These systems were reliable for their time, but they created a significant bottleneck: data frequently arrived in 24-hour batches, which was too slow for the operational decisions the business needed to make.
"The timeliness of the data was the main problem," Jóhann explains. "Some data that we receive is not being delivered until maybe 24 hours after operations — and sometimes that is too late."
The modernization roadmap called for moving to a cloud-first architecture: Databricks as the lakehouse, dbt for transformations, Power BI replacing Cognos for reporting. But one critical piece remained — a scalable, low-maintenance way to ingest data from hundreds of sources.
Icelandair had been using Azure Data Factory (ADF) for integrations, supplemented with custom Python and JavaScript code maintained by their engineering team. The problem was clear: ADF required engineers to build and configure each connector from scratch, and every API change downstream meant someone on the team had to stop work and maintain the pipeline.
"I want to simplify this. I want to make sure that we actually work on the data itself, not maintaining pipelines from A to B," Jóhann says. "Instead of spending weeks and months developing against some APIs, I'd like to see it working in a day — and then we can actually work on the data itself."
Choosing Hevo: Simplicity, Speed, and Cost
Icelandair evaluated four to five data integration platforms before making their decision. Three made it to a trial phase. Their evaluation criteria were clear and non-negotiable: cost, usability, and compatibility with the team's existing technical environment.
One competitor was eliminated early on due to pricing alone. "We saw the prices and we were like, okay, we're not going that route," Jóhann recalls. "It's way too expensive to actually just build ourselves."
Hevo stood out for how quickly engineers were able to get up and running — a pattern that echoed Hevo's experience with other customers. Where custom-built pipelines could consume weeks of developer time, Hevo's pre-built connectors meant a new source could be connected and streaming data in hours.
"With a few minutes or a few hours, you can set up the connector," Jóhann explains. "You have to wait for the initial load because it's quite big data — but instead of working on it for hours, weeks, months, we can get it set up in a couple of minutes and then actually work with the data itself."
Hevo in Action: Making Data Work for the Business
Operational Decision-Making at the Speed of Flight
One of Icelandair's flagship data initiatives is the transformation of its Operational Control Center (OCC) — the nerve center that manages disruptions, delays, and cancellations in real time. When bad weather or other events affect the network, the OCC must quickly determine which flights to delay, which to cancel, and how to recover as efficiently as possible.
Hevo plays a foundational role here: it ensures that financial data, customer data, and operational signals are ingested and available when decisions need to be made — not 24 hours later. The team has built algorithms to optimize decisions based on this real-time view: minimizing costs, protecting customer experience, and plotting the fastest path back to normal operations.
The results are visible in the numbers. In a recent year, according to Cirium Reports, Icelandair ranked first in Europe for on-time performance (OTP) five out of twelve months — a direct outcome of faster, better-informed operational decisions.
Connecting Customer Feedback to Business Outcomes
Icelandair uses Qualtrics to collect customer satisfaction and NPS data — but historically, keeping the Qualtrics connector maintained and stable was a recurring drain on engineering capacity. API changes and re-authentication requirements would trigger breakages that someone had to investigate and fix.
With Hevo, the team is working toward a stable, low-maintenance connection that frees those engineering hours for higher-value work. Alongside Qualtrics, Hevo ingests data from Google Analytics and Salesforce — sources the team "hasn't really been able to touch" due to time constraints — opening up new analytical possibilities for the marketing and commercial teams.
A Smarter Way to Evaluate New Tools
Perhaps most tellingly, Hevo has become part of Icelandair's standard evaluation process when adopting new software. As the airline brings in new vendors and applications - which happens nearly every month — the first question the data team asks is: does Hevo have a connector for this?
"If we go to Hevo and see a pre-built connector, that goes to Hevo," Jóhann explains. "If it's a general connector — Salesforce, Google Analytics, a database — we go to Hevo and ask the questions."
For aviation-specific, niche tools where Icelandair may be the only customer, they continue to build in-house. But for anything widely adopted in the market, Hevo is the default starting point.
Instead of spending weeks and months developing against some APIs, I wanted to see it working in a day — and then we can actually work on the data itself. Hevo makes that possible.
Looking Ahead: AI, ERP, and the Next Phase of Modernization
Icelandair's data modernization journey is still very much in progress.
Beyond infrastructure, Icelandair is investing heavily in AI and ML capabilities for 2026 and beyond. The airline has already developed in-house models for load factor prediction and maintenance forecasting. Now, the focus is shifting to agentic AI and generative AI use cases — initiatives that depend on clean, timely, and well-integrated data.
For Jóhann and his team, the goal remains consistent: move faster on data, spend less time maintaining pipelines, and put that capacity toward decisions that move the business forward. Hevo is a core part of making that happen.
Excited to see Hevo in action and understand how a modern data stack can help your business grow? Sign up for our 14-day free trial or register for a personalized demo with our product expert.
