The turbulent journey of CX: challenges faced by airlines and business travel.

The holy grail for seamless and delightful CX is a constant challenge for both airlines and the broader business travel industry. While both sectors are striving to elevate CX, they face a myriad of hurdles that hinder their progress. Here are some of their key challenges.

Airlines often find themselves grappling with budget limitations (around 33% according to the airlines themselves), making it difficult to invest in CX initiatives. This financial constraint restricts their ability to implement innovative technologies, enhance service offerings, or empower their workforce to deliver exceptional customer service.

They also rely heavily on integrated partners such as ground handling companies and catering services as well as many other suppliers. However, ensuring a consistent level of CX across these partners is a significant challenge, with 33% of airlines citing this as a major hurdle. When aviation industry partners fail to meet the airline's standards, the overall customer journey is negatively impacted, leading to frustration and unhappy travelers. 

Data is the core foundation of personalized and impactful CX. Yet, 29% of airlines struggle to capture the right data at the right time. Without a robust data strategy, airlines are unable to understand customer preferences, personalize interactions, and identify areas for improvement.

Business travel faces its own set of CX challenges. The most prominent is the fragmented nature of the customer journey. Data and insights are often siloed, creating a disjointed experience across various touchpoints. This lack of real-time, integrated information makes it difficult for airlines to anticipate traveler needs and provide proactive support. CX is highly fragmented and not in real-time currently.

Personalization is a key expectation in today's travel landscape. However, scaling personalized experiences to a vast customer base is a major challenge for the business travel sector especially when some legacy companies in the industry don’t believe that personalisation is important when all surveys are shining a light that it actually does matter. It is the limitations in technology and data strategy that decreases the ability to deliver bespoke services and tailor communications to individual preferences and its also the scale of the issue that means some business travel companies bury their heads in the sand to this increasingly important traveler expectation. As Quincy Hunte, Vice President of Digital Products at Qatar Airways, said at the World Aviation Festival “take a realistic approach and understand what you can actually do."

As airlines (and many other industries) increasingly embrace automation and self-service technologies for efficiency gains, finding the right balance between automation and human touch is crucial. While automation can streamline processes, over-reliance can lead to impersonal and robotic interactions, which erodes customer satisfaction. The importance of finding “the right balance between human and tech at the right channel and at the right time” shows the importance and need for a human-centric approach, even in a digitally-driven world.

Delivering exceptional CX in aviation and business travel requires addressing these multiple challenges. A holistic strategy that includes robust data management, seamless integration across partners, personalized experiences, and a thoughtful balance between automation and human touch is essential for creating a customer journey that drives both customer or traveler loyalty/engagement and customer or traveler satisfaction.