The International Air Transport Association has appointed Saadia Zahidi as its next Director General, the first woman to lead the trade body in its history. The appointment was confirmed by IATA’s Board of Directors in a Geneva statement on 23 July 2026. Zahidi takes office on 1 November as IATA’s ninth Director General, succeeding Willie Walsh, who steps down on 31 July after leading the association through its recovery from the pandemic years.
In the interim period between Walsh’s departure and Zahidi’s start date, IATA’s Chief Financial Officer and Senior Vice President for Corporate Services, Sandrine Le Borgne, will serve as acting Director General.
Zahidi joins IATA from the World Economic Forum, where she has spent more than two decades, most recently as Managing Director and a member of the Managing Board. She founded and currently heads WEF’s Centre for the New Economy and Society, and earlier in her career led its Global Communications Group and Global Programming Group along with its engagement work with academics, civil society and international organisations. She founded and co-authors several of WEF’s flagship publications, including the Future of Jobs Report, the Future of Growth Report, the Global Gender Gap Report and the Chief Economist Outlook. She has also served on the UN Secretary-General’s panel on women’s economic empowerment and on the European Space Agency’s High-Level Advisory Group, and is the author of a book tracking the rise of working women across the Muslim world.
Zahidi holds a first degree in economics from Smith College, a graduate qualification in international economics from the Graduate Institute in Geneva, and a public administration degree from Harvard. She holds Swiss and Pakistani nationality.
IATA Board Chair Roberto Alvo, who is also CEO of LATAM Airlines Group, said the Board sees her WEF experience strengthening IATA’s role as the industry’s voice at a moment shaped by technological and geopolitical change, and credited Walsh for leaving the association stronger and more representative than when he took over. Zahidi, in turn, described aviation as critical infrastructure for economic growth, trade and investment, and named working with airlines, governments and industry partners on standards, resilience and sustainable growth as her early focus.
For the distribution side of the industry, the transition matters less for the change in personality than for what it signals about direction on the standards that underpin modern airline retailing. IATA remains the central body behind NDC, ONE Order, agency accreditation and settlement systems, and has been steadily widening its footprint into digital identity, payments and data exchange. Walsh came into the role from running major airlines. Zahidi comes from economic research and multilateral policy work rather than airline commercial operations, which is a genuinely different profile for the job. Whether she takes a hands-on interest in distribution modernisation herself or leaves that largely to IATA’s technical leadership is not something the announcement answers. It is a fair question, and one that will only be settled once she is in office and her early priorities become visible.
For airlines, technology providers, travel sellers and payment companies across Africa and the Middle East, the appointment for now reads as continuity in IATA’s modernisation agenda, with the possibility of a broader economic lens shaping how those standards evolve from here.
