For an airlines that have passengers from all over the world then an assessment would need to be completed to understand this. Yes, airlines in general will need to comply with multiple data protection laws. This is because they would have data subjects from numerous countries. For example on a flight they could have passengers from UK, Europe, and UAE. In this instance three data protection laws would apply. This may sound overwhelming but they are very similar, so this would not be difficult to implement.
Initially we would analyse the reservation data. This will have nationality and airport that they are flying from. As the reservation system will not have the home address of all passengers then the departing airport will give the the country where the person lives. With this information we would have a good understanding of what data protection laws that would need to be considered.
We would undertake a gap analysis of the current data protection processes in place and then provide the additional policies, procedures, and controls for the airline to be compliant with the applicable laws. This would be backed by an audit to provide evidence that Datahub have assessed the organisation for the data protection laws.