Star celebrates 20 years

15 May 2017  2044 | Business & Trade Fairs

FRANKFURT Star Alliance returned to Frankfurt, the place of its birth, 13 May, to celebrate 20 years of connecting passengers”.

The alliance’s chief executive board, comprising the CEOs of all 28 member airlines, held its summer board meeting in Frankfurt, 14 May, a meeting that fell exactly 20 years to the day when its founder members – Air Canada, Lufthansa, Scandinavian Airlines, THAI and United – rolled out the first global airline alliance.

“Our founding fathers had a very forward thinking vision back in 1997,” said Jeffrey Goh, who took over as CEO of Star Alliance in January this year. “From that moment on Star Alliance was destined to drive innovation in the airline industry. We have done this successfully for the last 20 years, constantly striving to meet that original vision of a global network seamlessly integrated for international travel.”

The alliance enters its third decade with a strong and comprehensive network serving over 1,300 destinations in 191 countries.

Against this background, the strategic focus has shifted from network expansion, to providing a seamless experience for the over 14 million annual customers who connect between member carriers on their journeys.

“Access to instant information updates online from more or less anywhere has irrevocably changed the expectations of customers as they travel,” said Pedro Heilbron, CEO of Copa Airlines and current chairman of the Star Alliance chief executive board. “Passengers want to have control over their journey at their fingertips. That means having full access to a wealth of information, but also being able to personalise it to their own particular requirements. Providing such services to today’s ‘digital’ traveller on an alliance level is the central pillar of our new strategic focus.”

The IT hub infrastructure which the Alliance has put in place in recent years has allowed for the better integration of back-end services between the member airlines. With this now in place, the alliance is building and offering new digital applications.

In the case of missing miles, members in any Star Alliance frequent flyer programme (can now claim these online, through their own FFP website, even when the miles were collected on another Star Alliance member carrier flight.

The baggage hub, the most recent IT hub project, went live at the end of 2016, and facilitates baggage message transfer between the member airlines, their ground handlers and the baggage handling systems at the airports.

Today it processes on average five million baggage messages a day. This allows the airlines to better steer baggage operations and to keep customers informed on the status of their bag. Once implemented across the entire network, it will become easier to give customers proactive updates on their baggage delivery status.

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