Airlines set out to digitise the traveller experience

22-10-22

With the pandemic accelerating digital adoption and raising consumers' expectations of their travel providers, Lufthansa Group decided to realise its dream of creating a unit focused on customer experience.

After a few months of analysis in early 2022, the Digital Hangar was born in the summer and now aims to hire around 300 people to resource it over the next 12 months.

The launch of the initiative raises a number of questions, not only why now and what it will do, but also how it will work and be measured.

Creating a separate unit for this is about putting employees at the centre of the process and working in an agile way without disrupting day-to-day operations.

The company also decided not to create the unit within its existing Lufthansa Innovation Hub (LIH), because they are actually more different than similar.

The LIH deals with innovation beyond flying, while the Digital Hangar deals with the core business and covers websites, apps, call centres and more. Currently, Digital Hangar has teams dealing with several areas, such as booking and customer service and self-service experience. A second team deals with the airport experience and ways to make it more seamless, even in times of disruption.

Lufthansa Group is not the only company undertaking major projects to improve the customer experience as well as the bottom line.

At the recent Amadeus Altitude 22 airline executive event, airlines such as Finnair and American Airlines discussed the importance of investing in digital solutions, as well as the wider move to a modern selling environment through quotation and order management.

The airlines gathered at the event were asked to rank the challenges they face in order of importance, and customer centricity and seamless service emerged as the top two.