SWISS appoints new head of brand experience

Swiss International Air Lines (SWISS) has appointed Julia Hillenbrand as its new head of brand experience, effective July 2022. In this role she will be responsible, together with her team, for the entire SWISS brand and customer experience, and for the overall strategic roadmap for all customer, product and marketing issues.

Hillenbrand, who will report directly to SWISS’s chief commercial officer, Tamur Goudarzi Pour, will succeed Caroline Drischel, who assumed her own new duties as head of corporate responsibility within the Lufthansa Group on 1 April 2022.

Julia Hillenbrand has been in her current role as Lufthansa Group’s senior director of sales since 2019, with initial responsibility for Spain and Portugal, extended to all of Western Europe in May 2021. In this role, says the group, she and her team have substantially increased revenues and market share in the regions concerned.

Prior to this (2016 to 2019) she served as director of sales for product & programmes in the Asia Pacific region, based in Singapore. From 2014 to 2016 she was SWISS’s London-based head of marketing & pricing for UK & Ireland, with responsibility for strategic marketing and pricing planning – a role in which she successfully strengthened SWISS’s brand positioning in the markets concerned. She had previously acquired experience between 2005 and 2014 in various other capacities within the Lufthansa Group in business optimisation & network planning, business development, and marketing & sales, including a number of years working and living in Switzerland.

Julia Hillenbrand is a German national and holds a Master’s degree in International Business Administration from Pforzheim University. She has lived in 11 different countries and speaks six languages, including fluent English, Spanish, Portuguese and French.