«Disrupting the disruptors in today’s online travel space…»
People love to travel. The digital design agency Hinderling Volkart loves to work for travel brands, airlines in particular. This has led to the agency’s strong expertise in this particular field. With HV Shift, Hinderling Volkart started to expand its service offerings into “digital business strategy consulting” one and a half years ago. At the same time, Eurowings approached HV and thus HV Shift with a new, strategy-oriented project. Learn here how we were shifting gears during our collaboration with Eurowings.
Hinderling Volkart has a track record for outstanding UX and design projects in the airline and travel industry. Most recently, we helped Edelweiss creating an award winning booking engine: if holiday destinations are not flown too regularly, they will rarely appear in a standard online booking solution. This is why Edelweiss customers now start with clearly arranged calendars, destinations and alternative ideas — so innovative and intuitive that the desire for holidays increases.
A couple of years earlier Hinderling Volkart executed a project for Swiss airlines that has earned international recognition: an emotional, content driven and functional user experience. For the two airlines’ mothership, Lufthansa Group, Hinderling Volkart has helped to build the foundation for an omnipresent service app that takes the traveler by the hand — unobtrusively but firmly.
HV Shift supports Eurowings on its digital journey
Eurowings has embarked on a digital transformation from an airline towards a human centered, future proof and business ready travel e-commerce platform. HV Shift, the digital business strategy unit of Hinderling Volkart, was invited to support Eurowings on this journey. In contrast to the exciting UX and design projects cited above, this project is positioned on a strategic level, starting from the very beginning.
It is about “Why we do What (in the future)” as opposed to “How we do it”.
Eurowings has already established a vision for its digital platform of the future: an omnipresent, competent and trustworthy ‘companion’ for all travel related topics throughout the entire journey. (Check out this in-depth interview with Oliver Schmitt, Vice President Sales, Distribution and Digitalization at Eurowings, for a review of the airline’s transformation roadmap). Starting from there, we pursued a collaborative and co-creative approach to make the vision more tangible, concrete, and, last but not least, actionable.
Project approach
In collaboration with Eurowings, we followed a hybrid approach:
On the one hand, we worked on the ‘strategy fundamentals’ that set the framework for the company’s digital business strategy. Based on some basic hypotheses and visionary ideas, we conducted thorough quantitative and qualitative research and analyses along the 4M-scheme:
- Menschen (people/users): Who are the customers and what are their dominant needs?
- Momente (moments): What are the most important moments along the customer journey?
- Märkte (markets): How is the market evolving and what is the competition doing?
- Marke (brand): What is the essence of Eurowings, what does it stand for?
On the other hand, we ran project-specific ‘strategy sprints’ whenever the team required specific operational inputs for ongoing projects: e.g. “how does the (travel) search of the future look like?”, “how can we better tailor our business portal to the needs of our customers?” During the work on the strategy sprints we were able to gain valuable insights for the strategy fundamentals and vice versa. The cooperation thus meandered between a strategic and an operational level.
For both, the fundamentals and the sprints, we relied on the same research methods: desk research, expert interviews, customer surveys at the airport, experience maps, design-thinking workshops to create prototypes, ideation and design sessions.
In collaboration with Hinderling Volkart’s design and creation department we developed tangible, visionary ‘lighthouses’ (visual representations) to bring across the vision and to serve as a reference guide for the daily work.
The bigger context (insights from our strategy fundamentals workstream)
People (Menschen) & Moments. The travel industry continues its journey to a truly customer-experience driven sector. The ability of brands to link their product, their platform, and above all their user experience to a behavioral understanding of travelers is a key differentiator. Our client has established well crafted personas representing the most important user groups. However, shaping digital services optimized for specific personas does not do justice to the complex travel reality.
Motives and intentions are manifold and travelers switch their „persona“ hat even during a single trip.
Not to mention the various customer segments that Eurowings caters to: from frequent business travelers to all-inclusive holiday makers. Hence, we have to look for a more adequate reference framework.
In this project, we decided not to single out a specific persona and optimize his or her experience from door to door. Instead, we extracted the most important (and common) dominant needs and expectations along the customer journey for each (ok, let’s be fair, “most”) travelers. We then condensed these needs into universal principles. Our aspiration is that these universal principles will persist and stay relevant despite the ever changing travel landscape and trends.
Markets. With the development from a traditional airline to a holistic travel platform, the market environment for Eurowings expands. The whole travel universe is now relevant, be it from a competitive or collaborative point of view. With respect to the latter (collaboration), we learn that successful brands achieve to be where their customers are; whenever and on whatever platform they choose to be on. This requires us to strategically choose the platforms we want to be on — and implies that our own is not enough.
Nonetheless, aiming for a superior platform is still a necessity to stay in the game. Google aside, the „new kids on the block“ achieve this through occupying a specific niche, often leveraging an emerging technology. For them, it’s a promising strategy to focus on focussing. Talking about technology: Today it is AR and VR, big data, AI and machine learning for better personalization / curation of offerings; voice and everything on mobile to create a ubiquitous experience.
However, technology is never a done deal and technological change is happening faster than ever.
Tony Fernandes, CEO of Air Asia, summarized the challenges in the travel/airline space quite nicely: «A lot of that has to do with “disrupting the disruptors” in today’s online travel space…».
Brand (Marke). Eurowings aims at creating added value along the customer journey by delivering on the core principles (as mentioned above under people & moments). Following these core principles, we ensure that all the different digital initiatives and roadmaps are synchronized and aligned with the ‘travel companion’-vision. The principles are best described as set of user-centric values, rules and applications that can be used to conceptualize, test and validate the digital experience. the principles not only come to life in the strategic work but are incorporated in the design, the tone of voice or the functionality itself. They build the character and appearance of the travel companion.
So what?
The strategy fundamentals along the 4-M model provides the organization with a deep understanding of the context the company is operating in. It not only generates insights to align specific projects but it is also key to establishing a routine to continuously monitor on the ecosystem. Furthermore, it motivates the client team to be in regular dialogue with their customers.
Enhancing the old school offline experience and combining it with the specific digital advantages.
The details (insights from our strategy sprints)
In parallel, we executed strategy sprints in collaboration with the client for specific digital projects. Despite the solid insights and overarching guidance from the strategy carpet, some bigger projects required us to take a closer look.
An innovative search becomes the compass to navigate through the (Eurowings) travel universe. From flight products to travel services, from inspiration to post trip information: The pivotal element of travel planning, booking, organizing and even altering spontaneously will be incorporated in the modular checkout system. A checkout that supports the user in each and every decision he takes, no matter which decision path he follows, what device he uses or what his travel plans are. By nature, travelers are on the move. Thus, meeting them mobile is the only valid answer.
The checkout becomes a multi-product, multi-moment, and multi-journey process.
We tackled the topics according to the process described above. But we also strived to live up to our own recommendations in my previous medium article: Always trying to solve a real problem and doing it in iterative loops: With the findings during the test phase, it may not only be necessary to refine the prototype, but also to move back to the “define” phase. It’s like playing snakes and ladders. The sooner a strategy is tested, the sooner the right course can be set.
In addition, we try to stay agile as individuals, as an organization and in collaboration with the client team. At the core, we are following a design thinking process: from empathizing with customers, defining problems, to ideating solutions, prototyping concepts, and testing them. It’s all about strategizing and not so much about strategy.
A catalyst for the digital transformation.
In addition to generating insights, shaping the strategic vision and empower the client team to master the design thinking tools on their own, the project makes one more important contribution to the organization. In collaboration with HV’s design team, we made the strategic topics visible and tangible. By doing so, we created relevance for the employees and made the strategy understandable. Ultimately, the visual representation of the vision serves as a catalyst for the digital transformation of the airline company into a travel platform.
We are excited to continue the journey. It’s going to be a helluva trip!
If you want to follow Eurowings’ digital transformation, follow the work of the EW digital team here.
If you want to get involved with HV Shift, don’t hesitate to contact me directly. Give me a shout via Email, LinkedIn, Instagram or in the comments section.
If you would like to read more from Hinderling Volkart and our team follow our Medium publication.
