Star Alliance Shifts Focus to Improve Seamless Travel Experience

Jeremy Drury, Director Digital and E-Services at Star Alliance and the company’s CEO Jeffrey Goh during the IATA 74th General Meeting.

Star Alliance’s digital strategy has undertaken a shift from membership growth to improving the seamless travel experience, especially for those customers who fly on multi-carrier journeys, according to the company’s CEO Jeffrey Goh.

“Having control over their journey at their fingertips is of high importance to many travelers. Hence, harnessing digital technologies to provide a better and digital travel experience lies at the heart of this strategic repositioning,” Goh said while speaking to reporters during the 74th IATA (International Air Transport Association) Annual General Meeting, which was recently held in Sydney.

“The Alliance’s plan is to enable more interconnectivity between the digital services of the member airlines to elevate the customers’ Alliance travel experience”, he added. In order to achieve this, the Alliance has set out to develop digital capabilities centrally, which can then be used by its member carriers to enhance their own products.

The groundwork for this digital transformation was put into place at Star Alliance several years ago, with the creation of an IT hub infrastructure. The next milestone was the launch of the Star Alliance Digital Services Platform (DSP), which officially went live in February this year. Lufthansa uses the DSP to provide baggage tracking information for customers connecting to or from other Star Alliance member airlines.

Meanwhile, United has enabled advanced seat reservations for flights operated by Singapore Airlines, for customers who book these through United’s website, app or mobile site. According to an announcement, further Star Alliance member carriers have indicated that they would like to offer this enhancement to their customers and the necessary work on this has already commenced.

“Many additional enhancements of this type will be introduced over the next few years to provide customers with a completely new level of information and control of their journey,” the announcement said.

The Star Alliance network currently offers more than 18,400 daily flights to 1,300 airports in 191 countries.