Commercial airline passenger experiences have become heavily influenced and shaped by various forms of wireless and wired technologies offered by the airline. Here we explore two European carriers, Finnair and Lufthansa, that have been using and customizing In-Flight Entertainment and Connectivity (IFEC) offerings to improve the airline passenger experience for their customers.

Finnair’s Approach

In October 2015, Finnair took delivery of its first Airbus A350 XWB aircraft, and entered it into commercial service shortly thereafter. But the preparation for that entry into service began several years prior. Along with the flight operational performance and technological flying capabilities featured on the A350, Finnair wanted to use the new aircraft to introduce a new passenger experience to its customers flying internationally. Finnair, the launch customer for the A350 XWB, has a total of 19 A350s on order, which will be joining its existing all-Airbus fleet of 30 A320s and a combined 15 A330s and A340s. Piia Karhu, senior vice president of customer experience development at Finnair, said that the carrier's current top customer experience improvement investment is in deploying Wi-Fi connectivity across its entire fleet of wide-body aircraft, including all A330s, by May 2017.

"That’s at the heart of the company strategy and it’s an area where we want to very quickly make improvements and bring a new identity to the market overall. We also have highly on the agenda overall cabin comfort, and entertainment [through] all these digital enabled items. It is really high on our agenda and we have made the decision that we want to invest in this area and that it’s an integral part of the customer experience moving forward," says Karhu.

The solution came in the form of Panasonic Avionics’ A350 linefit solution, and its eXConnect solution for the Finnair A330 fleet. With the hardware selected, the airline would still need a company to develop a unique brand-appropriate and mobile-friendly user interface for Finnair passengers.

Reaktor’s IFEC Development

The process to develop what Finnair passengers are currently seeing in the airline’s A350 and A330 cabins began in 2013 when the Nordic carrier partnered with Reaktor, a Helsinki-based creative technology provider known for producing and conceptualizing custom digital service applications for several industries. Working with Finnair was the first time Reaktor had partnered with an airline to develop an In-Flight Entertainment (IFE) system, mobile application and a flight crew application using an onboard aircraft Wi-Fi portal.

"There's always a business case with every company we work with," Konsta Hansson, general manager of Reaktor's aero division says. "In this case the leading issue to be addressed was to make Finnair’s IFEC system easier to use and better looking. The existing system on their A330s dates back to the early 2000s, so it is limited in terms of its capabilities. There weren’t many things we could do in terms of e-commerce with that, for example, but we designed a user interface that serves the purpose of entertaining the passenger, as well as [aligning with] the Finnair brand for design and colors, etc."

The result of the Finnair-Reaktor collaboration was the Nordic Sky platform, which exists in the form of seatback IFE, smartphone and tablet application, and onboard Wi-Fi portal. By analyzing trends in consumer product purchasing and airline passenger feedback about cabin experiences at the time, both Finnair and Reaktor realized the best approach to IFEC going forward would be a combination of onboard IFE, Wi-Fi, personal device accessibility, and exclusive services.

“We believe that all these applications are different touch points into the same space of services. The mobile app is the first touch point,” said Hansson.

Reaktor’s vision for Nordic Sky was to be a digital reflection of the progression of an airline journey, which begins as soon as a ticket is purchased, and evolves in the days and hours leading up to the actual departure. Hansson says the company wanted to use the app as a digital guide through the journey to the destination, with the next most-pertinent piece of information readily available to the passenger.

“We have this overarching story that, when we designed these different features for the applications, we wanted to make those fit that story. We strived to figure out what the passenger’s overall journey is, and how can we build something that serves that passenger as well as possible so that they get some real added value from all these different services and applications,” says Hansson.

Analyzing the Passenger Experience

Once the Nordic Sky digital suite was first rolled out on the earliest A350s entering the carrier’s fleet and the in-service A330s, measuring success and analyzing passenger engagement, response and ability to enhance the passenger experience were the next steps for Reaktor and Finnair. Through August 2016, Reaktor has tracked a total of 381,117 downloads of the app, with an average 12,414 check-ins per week and 14,174 active users per day.

Passengers have also directly shown their feedback to Finnair’s changes, as well. In July, Finnair received the Skytrax World Airline award for Northern Europe’s best airline, based on an independent survey of 19 million air travelers across 100 different countries.

Moving forward, Karhu said the next step is to bring Wi-Fi to the narrow-body fleet.

“The timeline for the narrow-body fleet Wi-Fi connectivity is unclear but as a company we have made the decision to offer Wi-Fi services across all of our fleet and are moving very fast forward with that decision. Overall, this entertainment arena is moving in the direction that it needs to be, more personal and more relevant,” said Karhu.

Lufthansa’s Approach

Lufthansa is Europe’s largest airline, including Lufthansa Passenger Airlines, and regional carriers Swiss Airlines, Austrian Airlines, Eurowings, and Lufthansa Cargo. Across all fleets, the airline operates a total of 615 Airbus, Boeing, Bombardier, Embraer and Fokker passenger jets. The carrier also has a unique history regarding in-flight Wi-Fi access. In 2003 it launched the first scheduled flight with Internet, then suspended the service in 2006 after a satellite necessary to provide the connectivity went out of operation. In 2010 the airline launched Internet service on its long-haul fleet of aircraft.

That experience with in-flight broadband has lead to some lessons learned from Lufthansa, according to Sabine Hierschbiel, director of product management cabin interior and IFE for Lufthansa. Now, the company is addressing current trends in terms of passenger demand for connectivity with a focus on facilitating a solution that can match what passengers have come to expect in the air, which Hierschbiel says is similar to what they expect on the ground.

“According to a Cisco study, global Internet traffic in 2003 was around 680 million gigabytes, by 2014 the number had increased to more than 42 billion gigabytes per month. In 2014, more than two-thirds of global IP traffic was video traffic, if we believe the Cisco research that by 2019 more than 80 percent of traffic will be video. We, as airlines, will have to follow the technical developments necessary to offer connectivity at least as close as possible to the level of service that is available on the ground. That means continued investments in hardware and certification efforts including aircraft downtimes for installation. If you ignore for a moment the legal and certification efforts that take considerable amounts of time, the hardware we install will always be outdated compared to the latest ground infrastructure,” said Hierschbiel.

External-Internal IFEC Integration

Lufthansa is taking external and internal steps toward deploying the type of IFEC service that Hierschbiel mentioned. Externally, the German airline has a contract with Inmarsat to install GX Aviation across its short-haul fleet of more than 150 aircraft, giving passengers the ability to browse the internet, watch videos, connect to their company’s Virtual Private Network (VPN), download files, and more. From October 2016, Lufthansa Passenger Airlines will become the first European network airline to start installing an Internet infrastructure in its short- and medium-haul fleet. One advantage that Lufthansa has when it comes to implementing IFEC or anything technologically related is that it is both an internal Maintenance, Repair and Overhaul (MRO) organization, Lufthansa Technik, as well as an airline IT services division, Lufthansa Systems.

Through those internally driven product developments, Lufthansa is now the launch customer for the Lufthansa Systems-developed BoardConnect Plus, which is Lufthansa’s custom onboard component providing a wireless IFE platform that passengers can use to connect to the GX Aviation-powered Wi-Fi connectivity.
“Ancillary revenue is a topic that many airlines are looking into not only from an IFE perspective, but also as an enabler to think about new ancillary revenues that have not been available before.

Whereas, in the U.S., most passengers are accustomed to flying on aircraft that are already equipped with IFE and Internet, in Europe and Asia Pacific we’re still at the beginning of deploying what airlines can provide for their customers. BoardConnect is one of those technologies that is still evolving as we learn the best value that each airline can gain from it,” says Oliver Krueger, CEO of Lufthansa Systems.

Future-Facing Expectation

With the introduction of GX Aviation to its fleet, Lufthansa is adding one of the industry’s most advanced and robust in-flight Wi-Fi solutions on the market. The biggest challenge though for Lufthansa and other airlines that have already equipped and are in the process of equipping their aircraft with Wi-Fi will be meeting and satisfying passenger expectations.

“I don’t doubt capabilities of the satellite providers; I don’t doubt the infrastructure we carry on our aircraft and the growing demand in the technical infrastructure and the possibilities of the airlines to keep up with that. If you change something on an aircraft that means a lot of investment, and if I look today, airlines are installing 3G in Europe and 5G is already around the corner that shows how far behind we’re in the airline business,” says Hierschbiel.

While GX Aviation is capable of meeting passenger demand and usage trends today, Lufthansa passengers, like all passengers, are going to continue to increase their expectations based on the types of technologies that are becoming available to them on the ground.

“Do we really believe we can satisfy the same connectivity demands as on the ground? Is a bonus to carry on selling connectivity systems as something we want internet access at home? Or are we going to have to accept that sooner or later, satellite connectivity in an aircraft has its own rules?” asks Hierschbiel. “Onboard an aircraft not all communication can be used seamlessly by everyone and the complex infrastructure of connectivity does not come for free ... Raising customer awareness of the complexities of in-flight connectivity is essential in creating an acceptance of prices that are necessary to maintain our in-flight services profit target and to offer the latest technologies.” GCA