Why Travel’s Biggest Brands Are Becoming Dangerously Boring
Photo Credit: The Lufthansa Group is one of Europe's largest aviation conglomerates. Lufthansa Group
Skift Take
Some travel brands are making the same branding mistakes luxury fashion spent millions learning to regret.
On Experience
Colin Nagy is a marketing strategist and writes on customer-centric experiences and innovation across the luxury sector, hotels, aviation, and beyond. You can read all of his writing here.There was nothing wrong with Lufthansa Group’s recent rebrand. That, in many ways, is the problem.
The updated identity is calm, neutral, and system-ready — the kind of branding that passes smoothly through internal reviews, accessibility audits, and global rollout plans. The refreshed typeface is cleaner and the crane logo is subtly refined. It works across apps, aircraft, lounges, loyalty programs, and partner airlines. It offends no one, yet it surprises no one. And within minutes of encountering it, most travelers will forget it.
This type of rebrand is not a failure of design but rather is a symptom of a broader condition spreading across travel and hospitality: the rise of boring branding, or what writer Ben Schott has described as “blanding” — the systematic removal of character, edge, and specificity in favor of safety, neutrality, and consensus.
At a moment when travel brands claim to be obsessed with differentiation, many are doing
