CEO Alan Joyce has won plenty of plaudits (at least from his peers and money folk) for the reversal of fortunes at beleaguered airline Qantas.
The carrier was on its knees financially a few years back, yet under Joyce's tough but extremely focused leadership the company is appearing to turn things around.
Qantas hit rock bottom in 2011 when Joyce grounded the entire fleet during an industrial dispute with workers.
Since then the company has figured out how to run itself with a far lower cost base, made some important decisions about expansion and scale in places such as Japan and Vietnam for its Jetstar low cost carrier, and signed a hugely important strategic alliance with Emirates - essentially putting the so-called Kangaroo Route through the Dubai hub rather than cities in South East Asia.
Joyce says Qantas is part-way through the "change" programme and there is probably still another 18 months to go.
At the CAPA World Aviation Summit in Helsinki this week, Joyce picked up two industry awards for CEO of the Year and Airline Turnaround of the Year.
Lots of patting on the back for his restructuring and other moves to keep the airline going, but Joyce knows there's more to what Qantas has done, is doing, and will do, than alliances with other carriers and being smart about network operations for his LCC in SE Asia.
In particular, Joyce admits that the "biggest opportunity" that Qantas now has is actually in harnessing Big Data and expanding on the techniques it can use to leverage it.
He says:
"We have to tap into the future by using this Big Data, and take these opportunities now."
Qantas has been collecting customer data for 30 years, Joyce says, with more nuggets of information added to each individual's profile over time.
The airline now has 11 million frequent flyer members - although not all are native Australians, Joyce clearly sees this as an impressive statistic as the country only has a population of close to 24 million (he joked on-stage during a Q&A that the airline has people waiting at maternity wards to sign up new babies to the programme).
But it is what Qantas has been doing with the profile data of its passengers (and what it will do in the future) that illustrates how outside of the traditional business model that airlines are now having to play in.
Qantas has invested in two significant new areas: financial services and, using Big Data techniques, a digital media and analytics platform.
The media business is in particular has been "extremely successful", Joyce claims.
In short, Qantas uses the data it has from members to create better profiles of groups of people for when it wants to target customers with marketing materials.
How smart an investment has this been?
Joyce claims the platform is basically four times more effective as a marketing channel than its traditional advertising campaigns.
Whilst much of the attention on Qantas's "turnaround" will focus on Joyce's battles with the trade unions, the aforementioned Emirates deal and other corporate activities, moving into areas and capitalising on, in his words, the "phenomenal opportunities" that technology can now give an airline are also to be applauded.
NB: Disclosure - author's travel and accommodation costs were supported by CAPA event sponsor Travelport.