An Icon Steps Down
After years of veiled threats, Delta president Glen Hauenstein is retiring from the airline.
Dear readers,
Glen Hauenstein — a man many of you revere, and some of you fear because he can make your life miserable if you compete with him — will retire Feb. 28. After making many veiled threats that he’s ready to enjoy the rest of his 60s, he has finally indicated he will do so.1
It’s possible that no one has done more to transform how airlines market and sell their products over the past two decades. Hauenstein joined Delta in 2005 as chief of network and revenue management, and later became chief commercial officer before earning a promotion to president in 2016. During his tenure, Hauenstein reshaped not only Delta, but the entire industry, as airlines throughout the United States began to care more about the inflight experience.
Despite his elevated status among insiders, Hauenstein did it without receiving much recognition outside of this notoriously insular industry. In a world of CEOs with gigantic egos, crowing about their achievements on CNBC (even when they have very few), Hauenstein seemed comfortable as the man-behind-the-man, first to Gerald Grinstein, then to Richard Anderson, and for the last nine years, to Ed Bastian. He pulled the behind-the-scenes levers to make Delta the airline Wall Street has loved most over the past 15 years. As Hauenstein led the airline further into premium, Delta has built — and enjoyed — a sustained margin gap between it and its competitors, though United is in pursuit.
I called up United’s chief commercial officer to talk about the Hauenstein news, and after joking that he’d heard rumors about Hauenstein’s retirement for so long that he was shocked that it actually happened, Andrew Nocella said of Hauenstein: “I think he is the biggest and best at what he does in designing networks and commercial products and understanding how it all fits together.”
While many other insiders I spoke to on Wednesday raved about Hauenstein’s talents for honing networks, I think he also deserves a lot of credit for his work in de-commoditization — or making a particular ticket on a particular airline worth paying more for, and successfully persuading customers to do just that.