Lufthansa’s digital future takes flight with ‘Digital Hangar’

Barcelona proves a perfect fit

Lufthansa Group is joining a host of major business peers in powering up a digital hub in Barcelona, including fast-moving consumer goods makers Danone and Unilever, tech firm Dynatrace, and Roche in pharmaceuticals. Spannbauer and Lufthansa Group were attracted to Barcelona for many of the same reasons as their peers.

“The environment is very promising as it offers a very diverse open community, with access to tech innovation and startups,” he says, adding that the Barcelona center, which is operated by partner Quantion, will complement the other hubs in the Digital Hangar network. “The operating model of the Digital Hangars is transparent to the location; there is the same operating model in all places, and we do not differentiate.”

Barcelona is garnering a reputation across the technological world for its focus, skills, and government support for businesses looking to increase the pace of digitization.

“From the beginning, the government was helpful in the process and offered us a lot of support and help with offices, meeting the community, integrating us into the networks,” he says. “I hadn’t received such behavior beforehand, and it has flattened the learning curve for us. Many different cultures and communities come together here, and I feel that eases the collaboration, and this is the perfect fit to our target and our culture.”

The Digital Hangar has, of course, begun to work with generative AI, too, with the first iteration being used for the Lufthansa Group staff portal. Spannbauer says they started with a publicly available foundation model before enriching it with their own large language model.

“If you base your ChatGPT usage on publicly available models, then it is only a matter of time before someone offers the same service,” the CTO says. “We believe the differentiator is your own data.”

The Digital Hangar also provides Lufthansa Group and its airlines with its own software company. So what does this mean for major vendors, in particular Amadeus, the global tech giant of the travel sector?

“In the backend, there are still core IT services being provided by our partners, but it’s a different role,” Spannbauer says. “I believe the more we do with digital, the more our partners will benefit and contribute with their systems and infrastructure because as we increase our technology surface, there is a lot of room for our partners to maneuver.”