Star Alliance Touts Digital Innovation After Oneworld Summit

Less than a month after Oneworld’s 20th anniversary and brand update, Star Alliance, its chief competitor, is talking up its own upcoming digital innovation.

The Star Alliance is the second largest airline partnership in the world and is anchored by carriers such as United, Thai, Scandinavian, Lufthansa, and Air Canada.

The crux of Star’s upcoming digital plans centers on a better loyalty proposition across all 28 carriers. Right now, while it’s usually possible to book an award seat across carriers, it’s still difficult to use miles across them — say to use United miles to buy a bottle of duty-free whiskey or upgrade a seat on Thai. Coming up, Star plans to make transactions like that easier through well-designed digital tools.

The alliance also has plans to digitize and unify aspects of customer service, airport experience, and loyalty, though the latter field shows the most promise, according to Star’s CEO Jeffrey Goh. And even though Star’s fully deployed digital solutions are still in the works, they show a lot of promise for the future of a unified airline passenger experience.

Skift’s Raini Hamdi has the full interview with Goh from the Aviation Festival in Asia last week.

— Grant Martin, Business of Loyalty Editor

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Skift Business of Loyalty Editor Grant Martin [[email protected]] curates the Skift Business of Loyalty newsletter. Skift emails the newsletter every Monday.