Lufthansa partners with Nespresso to offer passengers quality coffee at the gate, for a fee

images by Raitis Steinbergs, Alessandro Teglia

DATE For years, Lufthansa has been one of the very few airlines – if not the only one – to offer passengers waiting for their flight at the gate complimentary coffee, tea (image), and newspapers at main airports around Germany, including its Frankfurt and Munich hubs.

Or as Lufthansa has stated in the past: “Offering hot beverages to passengers prior to departure is a long Lufthansa tradition. Lufthansa first began offering hot coffee and tea from large thermos flasks in the mid-80s and the first automatic vending machines serving freshly brewed coffee were installed at airports in 1993.”

However, similar to any other full service carrier around the globe who is looking to rationalize every cost item, Lufthansa has to rethink these kind of free amenities. Instead of cutting costs by simply terminating the free hot beverages and print newspapers the airline has come up with a smart alternative that taps into trends such as ‘paid premium’ and digitalization.

Coffee at the gate
Following trials in the first half of 2015 at selected gates at Frankfurt and Munich airports, Lufthansa a few months ago partnered with Nespresso to bring the ubiqituous coffee capsules to the gate area.

The premium Nespresso coffee doesn’t come for free though. Passengers can choose from regular coffee, espresso, cappuccino ior latte macchiato (the latter with fresh milk), each at the cost of 2 euros. For those passengers who might consider bringing their own coffee pods: For the business market, a different pad-shaped system of Nespresso pods exists which are not interchangeable with the consumer capsules.

According to Lufthansa, a total of 20 Nespresso Coffee Points have been placed throughout Frankfurt and Munich airports so that passengers from different gates can access the machines.

By replacing the free coffee vending machines with a paid for premium product, Lufthansa acknowledges the fact that consumer tastes have evolved over the years. Starbucks and Nespresso coffee can now be found at homes, hotels, lounges, as well as up in the air, and for example the Nespresso capsules generate revenues of around USD 4.4 billion to Nestle each year.

As Vassilios Georgakopoulos, Director Product Innovation and Concepts at LSG Group, puts it nicely: “The truth is that instant coffee is simply not good enough in 2017 and what international passengers want is 100 percent quality similar to what they experience at home. I wish more airlines could simply see the value of similar brand cooperations where both brands feature respectfully next to each other.”

Digital newspapers
As for the provision of free print newspapers at the gate: Lufthansa is switching over to digital reading material. The airline’s ‘e-journal’ service provides passengers with a choice of over 250 digital titles including publications in 18 different languages.

Passengers can access the digital editions up to three days before their date of travel by going to lh.com/eJournals via the Lufthansa app, and entering their name, plus either their booking code or ticket number, passengers can select their favorite titles, download them and then save them on their own electronic device. The reading material chosen is then available to them as a PDF file, even after the flight for an unlimited period.

In the Lufthansa lounges and in First Class on long haul flights, the usual printed reading material will still be provided, as well as printed versions of magazines in Business Class on intercontinental flights. In addition, at Lufthansa’s Frankfurt and Munich hubs, as well as at Berlin, Stuttgart, Hamburg and Düsseldorf airports, newspapers will be offered to all Lufthansa passengers from one of several central distribution points.

Read the full article here by AirlineTrends

TripAdvisor aims to make the airline passenger experience more transparent

By Marisa Garcia, FlightChic

DATE Airlines have long relied on awards and recognitions from industry watchers and major publications to reassure customers of the quality of their products and services, in very much the same way that professional critics and ratings firms have put their seal of approval on restaurants and hotels for decades.

But the rise of the internet has disrupted that ‘expert-review’ dynamic. The active participation of consumers on ratings sites which evaluate everything from films to books to consumer goods to services, and of course travel, suggests that today’s consumers trust popular opinion over ratings which could be perceived as an extension of marketing and advertising (a.k.a ‘the experience is the marketing’).

TripAdvisor Flights
TripAdvisor is now looking to shake up the airline industry the same way it has hotels, by launching airline reviews. The sixteen year old travel review site has accrued over 350 million individual travel reviews covering 6.5 million hotels, restaurants and attractions and has now expanded its TripAdvisor Flights service to let customers grade and review airlines around the world in much the same way that they would review a night’s stay somewhere.

These reviews are then combined with an external rating of the amenities on a particular route, such as the type of seat offered and whether there are power ports and wi-fi available to flyers, to give it an overall ‘FlyScore’ which will rate the quality of an itinerary on a 1 to 10 scale.

Consumers can sort their flight search results by price, duration, the ‘FlyScore’, or a blend of factors categorised by TripAdvisor as “Best value of time and money.”  TripAdvisor expects to refine the system, introducing further enhancements this year.

According to The Economist, “History suggests the firm has a good chance of making an eventual impact. If it does reach its potential, it might just encourage flyers to change their buying behaviour. If customers are willing to pay, say, $30 more for a seat rated as excellent compared with one that is terrible, then maybe airlines will pull out of their race to the bottom. A world in which carriers compete for the quality of the reviews they receive, as well as the price they offer, would be a better one.”

Early adopters
Already, a mix of full service and low-cost carriers from around the world – including Air New Zealand, All Nippon Airways, Cebu Pacific, HK Express, Air Canada, AeroMexico, SWISS, Aer Lingus and Transavia – have embraced TripAdvisor’s new metrics.

Transavia, for example, sees new opportunities to connect with customers in the enhanced TripAdvisor platform, and encourages its customers to share honest feedback about their flight experience at the end of their journey.

“Open and transparent communication plays an important role in this and this option allows our customers to write a review in an easy way. With airline reviews on TripAdvisor we can engage with our customers even more, since we will answer questions in the reviews when necessary,” says Paul de Raad, Head of Marketing and eCommerce at Transavia.

Time for Transparency
Bryan Saltzburg, TripAdvisor’s General Manager Global Flights, believes now is an ideal time for airlines to show transparency in their products and to improve how consumers’ compare and shop for flights. “Over the years, the in-flight experience has changed dramatically—in some ways for the better, in some ways for the worse. We know our users tell us it is not always easy for travellers to find the best options by just looking at the baseline price of a flight,” Saltzburg says.

“We’re uniquely solving that problem by surfacing candid traveler reviews and photos, detailed amenities information and tools to find the lowest fares all on one site empowering flyers to pick the best itinerary for their trip.”

Transparency of the passenger experience is also a major driver behind Airbus’ new AirSpace cabin concept.

As Airbus VP Cabin Marketing Ingo Wungetzer puts it: “In today’s connected world, there is tremendous information transparency for consumers, literally at their fingertips and this is also coming to the air travel industry. Passengers are increasingly expecting to know the details of the on-board experience and openly share their experiences in social media in order to find the best value. So naturally it’s important for us that also passengers, not only experts, understand our cabin philosophy, and that flying in an Airbus is directly associated with significant advantages.”

RouteHappy
TripAdvisor is not the only platform which has grown from the desire to give flyers what could be perceived as more “objective metrics” to help inform their bookings decisions.

RouteHappy has built a business around gathering and compiling comprehensive data sets about airlines’ products, with combined cabin experience ratings reflected as ‘Happy Scores’.

Like any other review of an experiential product, there is a subjective element to this objective scoring, but the company has established standards to calculate these experiential factors, applies them universally, and it could be argued, gives more refined and defined data to justify its scoring.

RouteHappy’s approach has been more collaborative, and focused on delivering the company’s data to the supplier sites through integration subscriptions.

The company is working various distributors and platforms including with Expedia, Google, Kayak, Skyscanner, Farelogix, and Sabre.

With airlines, like Cathay Pacific, Qantas, Delta and United, RouteHappy goes beyond data integrations to helping deliver a rich product content platform which showcases the airlines’ products and services.

Read the full article here by airlinetrends.com