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Increased customer satisfaction with loyalty solutions from Lufthansa Systems
The success of an airline is crucially measured by customer satisfaction and loyalty. Satisfied and loyal customers look forward to the next flight with "their" airline. Moreover, the majority of customers nowadays expect rewards for their loyalty. FrequentLine, Lufthansa Systems' product family for running loyalty programs, now enables airlines to identify and focus on their most valuable customers and business partners.

The challenges of strong competition in the aviation industry make it more and more important to address customer concerns and convince them that their decision in favor of a particular airline is right. Along with passengers, private companies, as well as corporations, evaluate intensively the benefits of a business relationship with an airline. Travel managers are responsible for identifying the airlines that best serve their employees. Travel agents, in their role as consultants to customers, also play an important part in the choice of a particular airline. FrequentLine is a flexible, modular solution featuring three fully integrated modules covering the needs of individual customers, the requirements of corporate customers and ensuring the loyalty of agents.

With FrequentLine, marketing specials addressing target groups on the spot can quickly be implemented. They are based on a high quality of customer data resulting from reservation data as well as from individual customer or company profile data. Overall, due to Open Source technology an early return on investment is guaranteed for the airline. Individual customers, corporations and business partners have an easy access to their loyalty account via Internet. Here they collect their flights including the automatic reward crediting and order the desired incentives based on a defined reward catalogue.

Greater comfort and efficiency in security
Security measures are one of the most cost-intensive aspects of aviation, particularly as they have been continually expanded since the events of September 11, 2001. They also frequently detract from the comfort of travelers. Because of this, there is an urgent need to develop more efficient and comfortable security processes which can be integrated into the passenger handling process as a whole.

Lufthansa Systems is already working on the development of such solutions. At the start of this year, the IT service provider assumed leadership of the "S3 - Security from seat to seat consortium, which also includes the companies RAND Europe and SAT Simulations- und Automations-Technologie, as well as Dresden University of Technology, the German Aerospace Center and ABS Airport Business Solutions. The goal of the consortium, which is being sponsored by a German aviation research program, is to further improve security standards while considerably optimizing procedures, processes and passenger comfort.

Together with its consortium partners, Lufthansa Systems has begun to develop IT systems which incorporate cutting-edge technology, such as biometric procedures for reliably and efficiently identifying passengers. At the same time, Lufthansa Systems is ensuring that the security procedures in development can be ideally integrated into the existing handling systems and processes of various airlines. Lufthansa Systems' extensive expertise in the area of critical passenger-oriented processes provides a solid foundation for this work.

Although high international security standards are being used as the benchmark for the research and development work of the "S3" consortium, this is still a German project. Major events like the FIFA World Cup 2006 are being taken as a starting point for defining the criteria which the new solutions must fulfill, as the great numbers of passengers associated with such events will place the heaviest demands on security systems. Even in or particularly in exceptional situations like these, the comfortable, economical and technically efficient execution of security processes is of the utmost importance.