Lufthansa launches an intuitive, personalized website

With its merger of three other airlines—SWISS, Austrian Airlines and Brussels Airlines—Lufthansa Group knew it was time to consolidate IT and bring all the brand experiences under one roof. At the same time, the company wanted to enable more individualized content along different points of the user journey, including promotional topics, flight planning and how to handle changes in plans. It also wanted to eliminate manual processes.

“We want to be very customer focused and be capable of bringing affiliates of Lufthansa to one platform to increase efficiency for the airlines,” says Karsten Krämer, Platform Lead Content Management, Services, Infrastructure at Lufthansa Group.

The mission of the project was for Lufthansa Group to take its online sales channel and customer service capabilities to the next level by offering an app-like experience on the website to inspire further exploration of flights and destinations. The company built one multitenant airline experience manager (AirEM) to save maintenance and development costs while allowing each individual airline to maintain its unique identity—using a library of shared components—within a common user interface.

“We further strengthened the partnership between Lufthansa and IBM when we decided to move to an Adobe-based cloud infrastructure and changed our development flow to support the Lufthansa [Group] Digital Hangar organization,” Krämer adds.

Working with product owners, an IBM iX^® team of scrum masters and representatives from IBM Enterprise Security Solutions, Lufthansa Group designed and implemented a managed Adobe solution hosted on the Microsoft Azure cloud solution. The new Lufthansa.com is based on the Adobe Experience Manager, a content and digital asset management solution.

Lufthansa chose to collaborate with Adobe because the company’s offerings could meet both its current and future needs. “Adobe gave us a wide range of capabilities for today and tomorrow. Currently we are using only Adobe Experience Manager and, later, we’ll take advantage of the software’s enhanced functionality for additional marketing and content management activities,” says Krämer.

Moreover, while IBM was an incumbent vendor, being selected for this transformational project was not a given: there was still a request for proposal (RFP) process. The response from IBM demonstrated a deep understanding of Lufthansa Group’s business and offered a dedicated team that would enable its digital transformation.

“We chose IBM as they had the capabilities of supporting us with development and consulting, as well as application maintenance on a 24x7 support basis as our business is operating globally around the clock,” continues Krämer. “Those integrated services gave us the chance to focus only on functional requirements to bring them online in a short time to market.”

“The result is a modern, responsive website that is designed to provide a security-rich, seamless digital customer experience on all devices to help travelers in their search for worldwide vacation destinations,” says Hans Maul, IBM Account Partner at Lufthansa Group. “Solutions provided by IBM application management services continuously deliver the necessary scalability, flexibility and reliability needed—especially in times of crisis.”

“Before AirEM, more projects worked in a waterfall model than in an agile working mode,” says Krämer. “With AirEM being a successful example, we increased the share of projects working agile.”

“AirEM was certainly not just a product transformation for Lufthansa.com end users, but also a transformation for the collaboration within our organization,” adds Auer.

“First, it was between our business department and the IT side: previously, with the waterfall methodology, there were more silos,” Auer continues. “The business and IT departments began working together during the RFP and procurement process. The second transformation was tackling the integration of the different airline units across the departments to bring organizational teams together. Lastly, for the development partners — design agencies and IT partners as well as all the other stakeholders in the project — it was very important to create a ‘one-team’ spirit so that everyone felt committed to the success of the project.”

IBM and Lufthansa Group jointly shaped a Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) team setup starting in 2019 while creating the new Lufthansa.com. There were many “pizza nights” as the team moved from waterfall to agile and faced their first go-live. The companies have worked together collaboratively as one team since then.

As additional airlines were onboarded to the AirEM platform over time, the SAFe methodology was fully implemented to increase employee engagement and efficiency, while speeding time to market for new features.

More than 120 different business and IT stakeholders from Lufthansa Group and five different vendors (including IBM) met together for three days every 10 weeks for product increment planning (PI Planning) to define the scope for the next 10 weeks. The team does daily stand ups as well as retrospectives where they reflect on the previous two-week sprint to consider what went well, what could be improved and what should they stop. The goal of this “inspect and adapt” exercise is to learn fast. They also have reviews every two weeks where the team presents their achievements and impediments: transparency is a key agile principle that enables them to adapt to change.

Lufthansa Group and IBM continue to collaborate to enhance the platform with new features to improve the customer experience. Using Agile Release Trains, multiple independent but aligned development teams work in parallel on new features across all websites on the same platform.

Additionally, the AirEM project has become a reference case for how to run large projects using agile principles within other Lufthansa Group organizations. “We learned a lot throughout the last two years,” explains Krämer. “The way we collaborated on Lufthansa.com was a blueprint for other projects to be set up in the same manner.”

Related to lessons learned, Auer says, “Some of the key success factors of the AirEM project include defining core goals and remembering to stay flexible; keeping management involved, and above all never losing focus on the end-user.”

Lufthansa.com is now IBM’s largest implementation of Adobe Experience Manager in Europe. The website offers an app-like and intuitive experience regardless of device used. It has become Lufthansa Group’s “global digital storefront”—a product showroom and primary entry point for passenger self-service and information. As many as 12 million monthly users log on to perform best-fare searches, learn about trip disruption recovery options and more—all with faster loading times.

The AirEM platform has been designed to support more flexible service delivery and rapid deployment of features, provide synergy among all the brands, and reduce maintenance and licensing costs. “The new Lufthansa website is intuitively designed, enabling Lufthansa’s content and business owners to quickly adapt to market changes, and it’s easy to navigate for external customers, delivering a variety of intelligent customer-centric features,” says Auer. The modular multitenant design meets the unique needs of each of Lufthansa Group’s hub airlines. Austrian.com, Swiss.com and Brussels.com were migrated to the platform as well. Lufthansa Group now delivers a personalized, high-performance web experience to 104 countries in 14 languages.

“We are serving more than 128 million pages a year. This is the most efficient way of informing and bringing our customers to our web platform,” says Krämer.

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.

Lufthansa Group (link resides outside of ibm.com) is an aviation organization with operations worldwide. It plays a leading role in its European home market. With 96,677 employees, the Lufthansa Group generated revenue of EUR 35,442 million in the financial year 2023.

The Lufthansa Group comprises the Passenger Airlines and Aviation Services segments.

The Passenger Airlines segment includes the network airlines Lufthansa Airlines, SWISS, Austrian Airlines and Brussels Airlines. Lufthansa Airlines also has a close relationships with the regional airlines Lufthansa CityLine, Lufthansa City Airlines and Air Dolomiti, as well as Discover Airlines, the Lufthansa Group’s holiday airline. Edelweiss, the leading Swiss holiday airline, is a sister company of SWISS. Furthermore, Eurowings also belongs to the Passenger Airlines segment.

Aviation Services comprises the segments Logistics and MRO, as well as Additional Businesses, which include Lufthansa Aviation Training and Lufthansa Systems. An agreement to sell AirPlus was signed in 2023. The Group Functions are also part of this segment.