During the pandemic, PI Planning meetings and all other AirEM project activities shifted to a completely remote setup.
“I will never forget March 12, 2020, when travel restrictions began,” says Auer. “This was the first day where the scalability of the platform was tested. Many travelers needed to get information about changing or postponing trips. We doubled our daily users to 600,000.”
“Our goal was always to bring as many self-service functions online as possible,” adds Krämer. “Because of the COVID crisis, we needed to speed up some of this functionality. For example, Refund Online was brought to life within a three-month period. We found out that we could do it faster through the website than with the call centers.”
In the weeks that followed, the AirEM team was required to create informational pages and develop new offerings quickly, such as a voucher program in addition to cash refunds.
Vivian Betac, Project Lead AirEM at IBM, explains how the team adjusted during the COVID-19 crisis: “Even during the COVID-19 lockdown, the agile way of working was a big advantage because it allowed the entire team, including developers, product owners, scrum masters and software architects, from five different parties in three different countries and eight locations, to continuously collaborate remotely.”
Aside from the scalability of the infrastructure, there were many occasions when the support of the IBM Managed Services team became a light. Even though Lufthansa Group had to react to incidents, such as travel restrictions and difficult weather conditions—an ash cloud, the team managed all these occurrences, preventing outages and securing speed in customer communication.
“We came through this critical time together because of our one-team spirit,” says Auer.
“After the pandemic, as companies got back to business travel, the AirEM platform also includes innovations for corporate customers on Lufthansa.com to book additional services using their own vouchers,” says Harald Hartmann, Head of eCommerce and Global Sales, Lufthansa Group. “Working together since 2005, IBM and Lufthansa Group will continue to collaborate on this digital transformation journey and enhance the traveler experience.”
“As people began to travel again post-pandemic, delivering a highly personalized customer experience is more critical than ever before,” says Tanja Waldeck, IBM iX Partner at IBM. “A strong digital product strategy can enable travel companies, like Lufthansa, to design content-led digital experiences throughout the entire customer journey, ultimately creating higher customer satisfaction and converting more website visits into real-word travel.”
“A key success factor has been the trust among Lufthansa, Adobe and IBM: we trust each other to work together and take responsibility for the same target as a team,” Krämer concludes.
