How Wheels Up Is Building the Future of Private Travel

Welcome back to The Friday Fortune! If your week has included at least one “quick five-minute meeting” that somehow turned into an hour and a half, congratulations, you’re living the marketer’s dream. Take a breather and enjoy a little productive procrastination.

Each week, we bring you fresh insights from top CMOs, marketing leaders, and creative thinkers shaping the future of the industry. From bold brand strategies to lessons learned the hard way, consider this your weekly dose of marketing inspiration, minus the corporate buzzwords.

Here’s what’s on deck this week:

• A sit-down with Wheels Up Chief Customer & Marketing Officer, Kristen Lauria

• Netflix tapping Amazon’s shopping data to sharpen ad targeting

• Uber Eats x Sesame Street

📈 Marketer of the Week

If there’s anyone reshaping how luxury travel brands think about marketing, it’s Kristen Lauria, Chief Customer and Marketing Officer at Wheels Up. With a career spanning aerospace engineering, global tech leadership, and transformational roles at companies like Xerox and IBM, Lauria’s journey is one of curiosity, reinvention, and a relentless focus on understanding customers.

Kristen didn’t begin her career in marketing. She started as an aerospace engineer, later earning her MBA at MIT and spending years in deeply technical roles. But what connected every step of her career was a fascination with how markets evolve and how companies can better serve their customers.

Her transition into marketing came from that same curiosity. In fact, she jokes that marketing can be even harder than engineering. As she explained during the conversation, “marketing is one of the most challenging and rewarding roles because the truth is there is no perfect answer after that equal sign.”

That perspective of bringing structure to messy, unpredictable problems has shaped how she approaches leadership today. Engineering taught her how to break down complex systems, build frameworks, and turn chaos into clarity. Those same skills now help her move through fast-moving markets and competitive industries where customer behavior is always shifting.

At Wheels Up, Kristen is applying that mindset to transform how private aviation is delivered and marketed. Rather than positioning private aviation around aircraft ownership or traditional charter models, the company is building what it calls an “aviation solutions platform.” It’s one designed around the customer journey rather than the plane itself.

In practice, that means combining multiple modes of travel into a seamless experience. A traveler might fly internationally on a commercial partner before connecting to a private aircraft for the final leg, or use smaller aircraft to reach destinations that are harder to access through traditional routes. The goal is simple: get customers from point A to point B in the smartest and most flexible way possible.

That same customer-first philosophy shows up in how Wheels Up approaches marketing. Instead of relying heavily on traditional advertising, the brand leans into experiential marketing, meeting potential customers at the events and environments where they already spend their time.

Whether it’s hosting hospitality experiences at major golf tournaments or creating curated travel-focused activations, the strategy is designed to let people experience the brand rather than simply hear about it. In a category where trust and referrals matter deeply, those in-person moments often become the most powerful form of marketing.

For Kristen, the most exciting part of her role is helping shift how the entire industry thinks about private aviation. By combining thoughtful partnerships, experiential marketing, and a customer-driven platform, Wheels Up is working to change what modern private travel looks like.

Kristen’s Takeaway

When asked what advice she would give marketers early in their careers, Kristen kept it refreshingly simple: stay curious and embrace every opportunity to learn.

As she put it, “Learn everything you can about every opportunity that's in front of you and you will find your path and you will succeed, whatever you define as success.”

To hear more about how Wheels Up  is helping transform private aviation, and why experiential marketing is playing a bigger role than ever,, listen to the full episode of CMO Weekly.

🥠 The Cookie Jar

Crack open a handful of the week’s best marketing links—because good fortune favors the curious.

• How OpenFortune Created a Fresh Approach to Advertising for Dr. Squatch. 63% unaided recall. Turns out the best place to sell soap is inside a cookie.

• Netflix Taps Amazon’s Shopping Data to Sharpen Ad Targeting. Your cart history and your watch history just became best friends.

• McDonald’s reality TV-inspired campaign turns kiosks into confessionals. Finally, a confessional with a better payoff than therapy.

• Uber Eats brings back ‘Almost Anything’ campaign with Sesame Street collab. Cookie Monster was always the most honest food influencer. Finally, his moment.

That’s a wrap for this week’s Friday fortune.

If you enjoyed the read, pass it along to your favorite marketer who could use a little extra inspo in their inbox.

Until next time, may your marketing be memorable and your cookies always be fortunate!

— The OpenFortune team