Here’s How Lufthansa is Digitising Its Fleet
It’s fair to say the travel industry has had a rough time of it of late. The last two years have been dominated by the COVID-19 crisis which has restricted air travel and the ability for travellers to enter other countries altogether.
However, with the world starting to tentatively emerge from the worst days of the pandemic, the time has come for the industry to begin rebuilding and discovering ways of coming back from a crisis which has devastated travel and through which many brands have not survived. Digital transformation has a significant role to play in this rebuilding and some companies in the travel space have taken this principle more to heart than others.
Lufthansa
Germany's flag carrier and the country's largest airline, Lufthansa is coming back from the pandemic with a firm focus on data driven innovation across its entire operation – with a firm focus on improving the aviation experience for its customers.
An interdisciplinary team of aircraft engineers, software developers, product owners and managers, data engineers, and data scientists were assembled and given the task of developing and operating a suite of applications designed to support its technical operations. Dubbed AVIATAR, the resultant platform leverages technology such as artificial intelligence to drive analytics in a far more scalable, cost-efficient, and event-driven manner than would have previously been possible
“Our Executive Board started a digital initiative knowing that the future of the Lufthansa Technik depends on our digital capabilities, too,” said Senior Director of Digital Solutions and Analytics for the AVIATAR digital platform, Jan Stoevesand. “We identified three fields of action: Digitise the core of our business, digitally enhancing our current portfolio and extending our product portfolio with standalone digital offerings. To be able to offer especially these standalone digital offerings, AVIATAR was born. An independent digital TechOps platform for the industry allowing us to offer open, modular, and neutral digital products.”
Air Travel
2.0 The progress made by the team behind AVIATAR is just one part of Lufthansa’s overall strategy which involves five key trends it expects to see emerge as we move further out of the COVID-19 pandemic.
The trends include the empowered consumer of tomorrow, virtualisation of human interaction, switch from transactional to relational, digital side of sustainability, and a slightly more nebulous concept being referred to as air travel 2.0.
Elaborating on the air travel 2.0 concept, Christine Wang, Managing Director of Lufthansa Hub (LIH), which has a mission to shape the near and distant future of the Lufthansa Group with new, digital business models which go beyond flying said, “in the short term a significant focus on reinstating confidence into air travel, self-service, biometrics, and health passports will remain, while in the longer term we see there are some very interesting use cases such as air taxis and how we are going to engage with those new players in the market.”
Final Thoughts
With its commitment to air travel 2.0 and creating new data driven experiences throughout its value chain – from the runway to the cabin – Lufthansa has made a compelling statement of intent when it comes to leveraging the restorative power of digital transformation to propel air travel into a new era – one hopefully free of global pandemics in the future.
You can hear Lufthansa Global Head of Digital Channel Solutions & Commerce, Gerald Schloegl, speak on How to Reduce Your Reliance on Third-Party Data to Drive Direct Sales & Loyalty In the New Cookieless Environment at Digital Travel EU, being held in November at The Tower Hotel, London. Download the agenda today for more information and insights.