Back We’re thrilled to announce that Forrest Corbett has joined arrivia as Vice President, Product Experience, effective September 2025. With Forrest on board, our product design and AI-innovation capabilities will reach exciting new heights.
Leading with Vision
Under the leadership of Ganesh Baskaran, Forrest will spearhead our design standards, product vision, and the fusion of data and machine-learning capabilities with seamless user experiences. His mission: to embed elegant design deeper into how we build and deliver travel-loyalty tech.
Why Now is the Moment
Forrest says it best: the opportunity to create the future of travel experiences at scale through arrivia’s platform is “thrilling.” From deep technical complexity to consumer-impacting products, this is exactly the kind of challenge he relishes — and exactly what we’re poised to do.
A Background That Aligns
With a track record that includes AI-led product development, design systems leadership, and user-centric design in cross-functional teams, Forrest’s experience aligns powerfully with arrivia’s mission of delivering smarter, personalized, data-driven travel rewards.
His First Six Months: Focused, Strategic, Impactful
- Gain a deep understanding of growth and recognition opportunities across the organization — and contribute to meaningful expansion.
- Lead the Innovation & Prototypes Team to quickly deliver new ways of working and leveraging AI.
- Establish design as a strategic, foundational partner and build alignment across Design, Data, and Engineering.
- Audit current product and UX flows to identify and remove friction.
Defining Success
Success, in Forrest’s view, means delivering measurable impact: reduced user friction, improved design craft, stronger adoption and engagement of new features, faster design-to-development cycles — and AI that not only supports how we work, but what we deliver … in ways our users love.
AI & Product Vision
Forrest will translate Ganesh’s high-level vision into actionable product and UX artifacts: user journeys, prototypes, identifying where AI/ML unlocks the most value, leveraging modern UX engineering, and improving collaboration across the organization.
Biggest AI/ML opportunities he sees in travel and loyalty:
- Smart search and recommendation engines
- Predictive personalization for offers, routes & bundling
- Automated customer support and conversational AI
- Churn prediction and retention triggers
Balancing Innovation with Usability
“For me,” says Forrest, “everything starts with user context — what is the user’s goal, pain point, and constraints — and then we layer in innovation. Technical approaches become so much easier when the vision is clear.” He emphasizes prototyping early, failing fast, and testing with real users so that “moonshots” remain grounded.
His guiding principles for product design:
- Design is foundational.
- Always find a way to delight.
- Be data-informed, not data-driven in isolation.
- Aim for purposeful yet scalable.
- Build transparency and trust with users, especially when using AI.
- Usability and accessibility are table stakes.
Leadership & Collaboration
To embed design deeply, Forrest will place design liaisons inside engineering and data squads, drive regular syncs, shared OKRs, co-design workshops and collaborative prototyping. He believes design should be the bridge builder across organizational boundaries — uniting Design, Product, Engineering and other teams in a culture of teamwork.
His leadership philosophy: enable others to be successful, leave design decisions to designers, give autonomy to the team, mentor deeply and create safe spaces for experimentation.
On balancing creativity with discipline: allocate exploratory time for designers & engineers. Build on aspirational design principles that push boundaries. Use structured, cross-functional processes to be reliable and predictable. And focus deeply on the “why” behind problems, not just symptoms.
Looking Ahead: Trends & Learning
Forrest is excited about design-to-code rapid prototyping, contextual and ambient personalization, multi-modal interactions (voice, AR/VR), explainable AI, and federated learning & privacy-preserving personalization.
One thing he wants to learn: the ins and outs of travel/logistics and arrivia’s business approach.
One thing he’s eager to teach: design intelligence, design-engineering approaches, how to scale creative rigor across product teams.
A fun fact: He’s been spending more time in Cursor than Figma lately — and says he’s an avid snowboarder and mountain biker.
Join Us in Welcoming Forrest
We’re excited to step into this next chapter with Forrest driving our product experience forward. We look forward to sharing the results of his vision in the months ahead: smarter experiences, more elegant design, meaningful AI-driven capabilities and travel rewards our clients and members love.
