Delta eyes redo of air travel
ATLANTA — Delta Air Lines CEO Ed Bastian wants to transform the air travel experience by the year 2025.
He envisions that when you request a ride to the airport, Delta’s app could recommend how early you need to leave based on highway traffic, and which airport security checkpoint has the shortest lines.
Your bags would be picked up from your home and delivered to your hotel, so you wouldn’t need to lug suitcases to the airport or wait at baggage claim.
You could choose which seats to book during a virtual walk through the plane via augmented reality and you could track your bags through the Fly Delta app as well as pets and a child traveling alone.
“If the stress of traveling starts even before you leave home, how can we alleviate it?” Bastian said last week at the world’s largest consumer technology show which wrapped up Friday in Las Vegas.
Delta has invested “billions” over the past five years to transform the Atlanta airline’s technology, Bastian said.
A big part of Delta’s plan is linking to other parts of the travel experience including your ride to the airport and personalizing customer service based on your past travel history on the airline.
The airline announced plans at the conference to expand its partnership with ride-share company Lyft, such as incorporating flight delays, weather and traffic when passengers request a ride to the airport. The two companies also are exploring features like allowing travelers to pay for rides with miles.
Another project: Personalized information displays for travelers at the airport, to be piloted at Delta’s Detroit hub this summer. The technology, called parallel reality, can display different customized information to multiple people simultaneously on the same screen — allowing travelers who opt in to get information displayed on their particular gate and flight status in their preferred language.
Airlines have long had a more industrial and operational focus on the nuts and bolts of transportation, and Delta has fumbled on technology in the past, including failures that grounded flights for hours in Bastian’s first year as CEO.
When Bastian took the helm of Delta in 2016, he emphasized that the airline needed to keep its image “fresh” to “appeal to the needs of a new generation.” Bastian said at the time that he wanted to keep Delta’s brand and technology fresh in part because half of its employees would soon be millennials.