Star Alliance Explores a Broader Loyalty Proposition Beyond Airlines

Star Alliance is thinking beyond air. It is exploring technologies that will allow frequent flyers to redeem miles not just for flights and upgrades but home stays, tours and activities, even underground train tickets. While this may sound like a yawn, it is big deal for airlines, where it is still not even possible for passengers to use miles accrued from one Star Alliance airline to redeem a bottle of whiskey on another when shopping inflight. That, too, is being explored. All this is part of Star Alliance’s digital transformation which began February last year when it partnered with Accenture to create a ‘digital services’ platform. Once a digital service is available on the platform, member airlines can decide individually if they want to make it available to customers. One such digital service that has taken off is seat selection across member carriers. A United Airlines customer can now select his seat for the entire journey on United and Singapore Airlines on h