Above & Beyond: Designing the Future Business Travel Experience with Lufthansa Innovation Hub
By: Zoey Tsopela
Tags: Future Of Work, Innovation, Future Of Travel, Mobility, Business Travel

This article was written by Renee Semko Gonzalez and edited by Zoey Tsopela. On behalf of the Above team, a special thank you goes out to our guest speaker Tino Klähne, Head of Strategic Design at Lufthansa Innovation Hub.

With the holidays around the corner, our final Above and Beyond talk for 2020 covered a topic that usually plays a critical role in meeting up with friends and family around this time of year — air travel. While many industries have been hard hit by the pandemic, there’s no denying that the aviation industry has been one of the hardest hit. With a vaccine on the horizon and already being rolled out in some countries, many of us are turning our thoughts to when and how we will return back to “normal,” how hard hit industries will recover, and what conducting business will look like post-pandemic.

With so many unanswered questions about the future of travel, we were lucky enough to have the Head of Strategic Design at Lufthansa Innovation Hub (LIH), Tino Klähne, as our speaker. LIH “explores new digital business models with a mission to “create and capture value beyond flying.” They build ventures in the travel & mobility tech space that focus on traveler life cycles instead of passenger experiences — a shift that is redefining our notion of what it means to travel. Examples include TMNT, a data-driven trip, and mobility trend platform, and Compensaid, a Sustainable Aviation Fuel option for consumers wishing to offset their individual carbon footprint caused by their trips.

While Tino’s insight into the aviation industry had all Abovers — who surely had encountered one or two canceled flights in the last year — buzzing with curiosity, none were more curious than our business development team. Up until this year, travel was a significant component of their work, from trips between our studios in Stockholm, Malmö, San Francisco, and Shenzhen to meeting with clients across the globe. What would business travel look like for them in the coming years? Would there even be such a thing as “business trips” anymore?

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Over the next hour Tino and the Above team discussed how we envisioned the future of business travel and what areas of opportunities interested us most:

✈️ Transforming “wasted time” into viable productivity

Many of LIH’s ventures tackle the more inconvenient aspects that come with travel, such as “wasted time,” where nothing productive can get accomplished due to limiting factors like poor internet connectivity or lack of appropriate work surfaces/accessories. While the in-flight experience is not at the core of LIH’s work, it has facilitated deep partnerships with ventures like Skyroam, a mobile wifi hotspot, and LoungeBuddy, a smartphone app for accessing airline lounges. One Abover suggested further improving in-flight amenities to allow business travelers to get more done during flights.

“The digital tools like collaborative whiteboards and video conferencing that we’ve been forced to adapt to this past year will likely not go away. Can connectivity be improved in-air so people can work on planes the same way they might during a layover?”

Of course, not everyone agreed that mid-flight was the best place for a video conference. Some felt that taking meetings in such a confined space would be disturbing to other passengers or create issues with regards to confidentiality. Nonetheless, the radical changes we were forced to make in how we worked this year will undoubtedly elevate our expectations of how we get work done while traveling.

✈️ Reimagining the office

Reimagining how we get work done on the go also sparked discussion on where we get work done. Felix Carlsson, a Mechanical Engineer at Above, brought up several interesting points around incorporating flexible working space into the air travel arena.

“If people are going to be working from home 50% of the time, will companies even have offices in the future. Is there a way for LIH to translate their expertise in the lounge/service experience to succeed where WeWork did not?”

Aviation groups like Lufthansa could appeal to business travelers by creating functional office/lodging offerings in commercial hotspots like Frankfurt and Shenzhen. Lufthansa could leverage their service experience and fully arrange safe/sustainable business travels between sites (e.g. Frankfurt site to Shenzhen site). Such a service would cater to the increasing popularity of remote, distributed work while also cutting down on the aforementioned “wasted time” one encounters while traveling for work.

✈️ Redefining the travel “experience”

The biggest topic in our discussion undoubtedly centered around the experience of travel itself. Some felt that business travel would resume in less frequent intervals, so maximizing what they got out of each trip would become the primary priority of business travelers. With rising climate concerns and the increased popularity of remote work setups, others questioned if business travel could still be en vogue after this year?

There’s no denying that the nature of work has drastically changed in the last 9 months (with a few exceptions). Businesses that leveraged tech quickly were able to ground sales/business teams and have reported a boost in sales and higher productivity. The effectiveness of remote work in roles that traditionally traveled often will force many to reexamine what a typical business trip should look like, if taken at all.

Tino pointed out that travelers should start by evaluating the types of business experiences they’re considering traveling for. He claims you have to be strategic about what activities can be crammed together (e.g. meeting multiple clients all in the same area) versus which activities are best left with some breathing room to digest information (e.g. a conference).

For those that travel for a living, the post-Covid era should bring with it new levels of consciousness about why we’re traveling but, more importantly, how and when we should make the most of our trips. Moving forward, business travel will become less functional but more emotional and immersive.

✈️ The rise of business + leisure travel

A critical component of “making the most of our trips” is the hybridization of business and leisure travel (sometimes referred to as ‘bleisure’), which was growing in popularity even before the pandemic hit. Studying past economic crises, McKinsey predicts leisure travel is the first to recover, followed by business travel in phases. A significant driver in leisure travel is the appeal of the “experience economy” to Millennials, an age group with enough tech-savvy to heavily adopt remote working and disposable income to afford frequent travel. The question then becomes how aviation groups can leverage their expertise in concierge services and amenities to provide leisure offerings to Millennial leisure seekers and business travelers alike, especially as the distinction between the two continues to blur.