Lufthansa Group, SVP, Channel Management, Tamur Goudarzi Pour, at the CAPA Airline Leader Summit 2023

Transcript

Tamur Goudarzi Pour:I think very important is, of course, the digitalization efforts that we're doing. So we do it in-house with our digital hangar, but we're also partnering a lot now and more than we did with either startups or big industrial players from the ecosystem to actually bring all the new things that you see mostly in other industries also to the airline industry to bring it to Lufthansa Group. Take the example of the modern airline retailing program. So it's the whole journey from inspiration to post-flight engagement and loyalty that has many steps that you need to reform, be it the distribution, be it placement, be it payment, be it servicing. Many elements there where I think we need to create products that are currently available in other industries on the B2C side. And we have to bring it to the aviation world. And I take one example, let's take a wallet for payment where you can, for example, connect a wallet in the future with an inspirational element when you say, I want to save money for my next wedding trip. And so a wallet becomes also an inspirational base. So how do you actually connect to passengers to get to higher frequencies? And you see it in the new social media world where you have much higher contact frequency, which you normally don't have in an airline world. That's an example where you can definitely catch up, and that's something where we have a great need not to be superseded by all the other industrial players that are continuing to work on that in retailing, in fintech, etc. So we can learn a lot here for our industry also from others. Well, it's going to be a mix, and you have to decide what is the USP that you need to control yourself, you need to build yourself, And where do you partner? And the important thing is here, we should not go again into monopolistic or oligopolistic structures. So we need to build this modularly. So when you take, for example, the PSS or the offer, that's something where a modularization will take place in the IT backbone, and then you can select which part you want to do yourself, where you want to partner. You might take everything from a partner if he has a convincing, superior, technologically superior offer, but you have the choice. And I think this goes for every step of the value chain of airline retailing and also for the backbone. We need to identify really those elements that we need to reform ourselves and where do we partner with tech partners or with other industrial partners. Well, as I said, you need to reform the backbone. That's really brick-and-mortar business, but it will take longer because you need to divide the elephant in pieces and do it step by step. So I think that is really until 2030 the big challenge. When we look at the developments in the last weeks, I think with a light-speed development, you see currently what's happening on the search and also on the consideration side. So I think all natural language processing algorithm now being applied also to aviation is a great topic. ChatGPT or what comes out from Google, we will see this in the backbone, we'll see it in marketing, we'll see it in sales, we see it in servicing. And I think there's quite a lot of change happening right now. So it's really exciting, and I'm sure there will be some great new products coming out of it.

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