The airline industry is evolving rapidly, with technological advancements reshaping operations and customer interactions. Below are the five key technology trends transforming the airline industry:
1. Transitioning to Offer-Order-Settle-Deliver (OOSD): Airlines are moving beyond traditional Passenger Services Systems (PSS) toward modern retailing solutions based on OOSD. Leading carriers like BA and AF/KL have started phased rollouts, prioritising areas such as dynamic pricing and order management in order to move to enhanced retailing capabilities. Others focus on data-driven dynamic retailing capabilities with personalisation and experimentation / optimisation capabilities to increase direct share, improve customer experience and create new revenue opportunities.
2. Building Modular Systems: Microservices architectures is a modern software development approach where an application is composed of small, independently deployable, and loosely coupled services. This is meant to allow for agile and scalable development. Each service focuses on a specific business capability and communicates with other services through well-defined Application Programming Interfaces (APIs).
However, airlines and other travel companies are rethinking overly decomposed approaches and rather focus on the areas where they can really create impact and a reliable performance.
Challenges with micro services include complexity of managing multiple services, their communication, and dependencies without clear benefits. Additional challenges include areas of data management, monitoring and debugging, network latency and overhead and increased resource usage.
3. Decoupling eCommerce from PSS: A rising trend is the use of middleware to decouple eCommerce platforms from decades old monolithic Passenger Services Systems (PSS), offering greater flexibility, greater brand distinction, less cost and reduced reliance on legacy providers.
- Big airlines like BA and LHG are exploring bespoke solutions.
- Others leverage solutions like Sabre DC or Amadeus DxAPI or web services coupled with best possible dynamic retailing shopping technology platforms to create a seamless customer experience and personalised ancillary proposition fast.
4. Optimising Content and Integration: Headless CMS tools are now the standard for flexible content distribution, and channel-specific integration layers are replacing traditional omni-channel middleware. This allows content consistency and personalised content delivery for a better customer experience, and control and effectiveness for airline teams.
A headless CMS is a content management solution that decouples the backend (where content is created, stored, and managed) from the frontend (how content is presented to users). This architecture enables travel companies to deliver dynamic, consistent, and personalized content across multiple channels and devices, such as websites, mobile apps, kiosks, and other touch points including in-flight entertainment systems.
5. Technical Architecture: Modern airline systems are shifting to:
- Responsive Single Page Applications (SPAs) for dynamic and seamless user experiences are a game changer in modern web development. By combining responsiveness (adaptability to different screen sizes and devices) with the interactivity of SPAs, travel companies can deliver fast-loading, highly engaging and consistent applications that meet modern user expectations. If implemented well, be optimized for search engines.
- Cloud-native, modular back-end systems are designed to fully exploit future-proof cloud computing advantages, including elasticity, scalability, and automated resource management. Additional advantages includes resilience, faster development, flexibility and cost-efficiency.
What This Means for Airlines and other travel companies
- Hybrid strategies: Pioneering carriers are adopting hybrid strategies of custom development and vendor partnerships. Benefits are full control but challenges include scope and cost creep as well as lower time to market.
- Strategic Modularization: This approach focuses on aligning modular design with long-term business goals, ensuring that each module contributes to the overall strategy. It offers some practical benefits without overstretching resources.Examples include decoupling payments or front-end experiences,
- Partner with trusted vendors: Collaborating with external middleware providers who support your company's vision and innovation goals and bridge your transformation and resource gaps helps minimise implementation and investment risks and fast time to market while staying competitive and relevant.
