Star Alliance has launched a Digital Services Platform (DSP) as a first step to an overall enhancement of digital and mobile services offered to customers travelling across the 28 airline member Star Alliance network. The platform was developed and implemented in conjunction with Accenture as part of the Alliance’s strategy to further improve the customer journey.
The DSP can gather data provided by an individual member airline or third-party source and make it available to all members, enabling them to build it into their own customer facing digital applications. The longer-term aim is to allow customers to use any member airline’s website or mobile application to obtain all the information they need for travel on several Star Alliance member airlines.
“Most frequent travellers have a ‘home airline’ in our network and would prefer to control their entire travel experience through a single app or website,” said Star Alliance CEO Jeffrey Goh. “We are therefore working to create central capabilities that can be shared for use by our individual members.”
Once a service offer is available from the DSP, member airlines can decide individually if and when they make it available to customers. For instance, a seat selection feature launched on February 2nd now allows a United Airlines customer to select a seat on Singapore Airlines flights booked via united.com or the United App. As a result, the customer travelling on fare types that include complimentary advance seat selection can choose a specific seat at time of reservation for the entire journey on United Airlines and Singapore Airlines, rather than only at time of check-in. This feature will be made available across the Alliance progressively.
Lufthansa is also using the DSP technology to provide baggage tracking information for its customers on journeys that include flights on other Star Alliance airlines. The data is provided by the Star Alliance Baggage Hub which went into operation at the end of 2016. It collects relevant baggage information from a wide-range of sources and makes it available to all member carriers included in a passenger’s itinerary.
In addition to helping develop and implement DSP, Accenture is supporting Star Alliance with on-going work to identify customer pain points and expectations.
Critical to the development of DSP services is to ideate, prototype and develop DSP features from a customer perspective. The aim is to identify these more frequent issues or
areas for improvement that may arise when customers are travelling on one or more airline, as well as in the event of service disruptions.
“A seamless travel experience for airline customers depends on an airline’s ability to participate in a broader travel ecosystem spanning the whole spectrum of the aviation, travel and tourism industry,” said Robert Zippel, who leads technology consulting within Accenture’s Travel industry practice. “Airlines need to embrace collaboration with their alliance member carriers and associated ecosystems to orchestrate a greater understanding of a traveller’s fast-changing requirements. By offering real-time data exchange and standardised applications to improve a customer’s travel experience for multiple carrier journeys and beyond, the Star Alliance DSP is a great example of a system that enables this kind of collaboration.”