How Lufthansa Group is investing in the customer experience

After a couple of challenging summers, Lufthansa Group is optimistic about the next few months as well as its overall growth trajectory in 2024.

In late 2023, the group made a number of changes including transitioning Swiss International Air Lines chief commercial officer Tamur Goudarzi Pour into a corporate level role to lead customer experience and head up a new task force to boost customer satisfaction.

During a Center Stage session at Phocuswright Europe in Barcelona earlier this month, Goudarzi Pour, who is now six months into the role, shared that he feels a bit like the fire brigade.

“When you have a task force, mostly you have some fire you have to extinguish. Two summers post-COVID, there have been a lot of issues that our customers have suffered from. Some of those things were in house, some were driven by externalities,” he said.

“We felt that for the third summer, we still have to do some brick and mortar fixing to make A to B travelling more reliable.”

The idea is for the task force to be phased out once the summer ends, he added, but not before areas such as punctuality, cancellations, baggage tracking and customer communications are tackled. 

In addition, investment in physical and digital initiatives to the tune of €2.5 billion is under way according to Lufthansa Group’s first quarter earnings, but the budget will likely end up being more, a further €500 million, according to Gourdarzi Pour.

Once the taskforce is no longer needed, he will still have responsibility for many of the distribution issues he has worked on in the past and including the transition to offer and order going forward.

Sharing thoughts on when progress using the New Distribution Capability technology standard just becomes plumbing and there is real change to the customer experience, he said that it depends who you ask.

“I think the industry is at different speeds now,” he said.

“So there are some airlines that have progressed fast, with a high level of direct sales, which is always mixture between all platforms and what you distribute on third party via NDC… Some others have caught up but there are some other airlines that probably haven’t even started.”

The discussion moved on to the likelihood of airlines being ready to transition from the PNR (passenger name record) world in the next five to seven years. Goudarzi Pour also spoke on artificial intelligence use cases for carriers and whether the rapid pace of technological change is a concern.

Watch the full session below: