Teaming up with Lufthansa Group to co‑create a new premium travel experience

Overview

With the advent of the digital age, people’s expectations, behaviours and desires are changing in unprecedented ways. The Lufthansa Group set out to reshape the travel experience for their customers by making it more effortless, personalized and sustainable.

To achieve this, they formed the Passenger Experience Design team, with the mission to embed user-centered thinking within the organization. In 2018, Lufthansa Group selected Star as a long-term partner to support various strategic initiatives from a digital product and service design standpoint.

The challenge

Though air travel is the fastest form of transportation, the passenger journey itself is complex and starts well before stepping foot inside the airport.

Once inside, baggage, security, health and safety measures, and finding the gate are just a few of the challenges one faces before repeating the process in reverse at the destination. 

Balancing cost-pressure and increasing customer expectations mandates a new approach to using innovative technology to empower both passengers and airline staff along their journeys to simplify this process. 

Airlines are no longer only competing with other airlines, but with any brand that provides exceptional customer experiences. New players such as Airbnb and Uber are disrupting the travel industry with new business models while setting new benchmarks regarding the customer experience. In addition, they have to compete with the pandemic’s economic effects and shifting consumer preferences away from air travel. 

To stay relevant and survive in the fierce competition for market share, airlines ought to rethink their market position from product-centric to human-centric. After all, the mission of an airline should be to fly people, not planes (as stated by Guido Woska – Head of Passenger Experience at Lufthansa Group)

In the experience economy of the 21st century, people don’t just want to buy an air-ticket to get from A to B; They want to purchase an effortless and personalized travel experience – from booking and check-in, through security, to baggage collection and beyond.

To elevate the customer experience at each touchpoint along the journey, the Lufthansa Group teamed up with Star to conceptualize and prototype user-centered services and digital products.

The Project

Star has been supporting various initiatives in close collaboration with the passenger experience design team.

Star’s digital design expertise has been key to success: While there is seldom a lack of ideas, what is more challenging is identifying the most promising ones and maturing them into a well-rounded (digital) service experience. 

Star’s cross-functional team of strategists, designers and developers facilitates the innovation process from initial ideation sessions, to prototyping and user testing.

Working in this manner, Star helped the Lufthansa Group rapidly translate early hypotheses into tangible solutions validated with real people in context, be it on the ground or in the air.

The scope of initiatives included successful cases such as a digital delayed baggage service, a fully personalized flight booking platform and a vision movie about the ideal journey of the future air traveller. 

Project Scope