Lufthansa and SAP join up to launch the first ‘Aviation Blockchain Challenge’

Lufthansa has partnered with SAP to launch the first Aviation Blockchain Challenge, aimed at exploring how blockchain solutions can improve services to travellers.

Participants will also be expected to come up with ways of making supply chains and maintenance procedures more efficient.

“Blockchain is one of the game-changing technologies of our time, which we are systematically addressing as part of our digital strategy for the Lufthansa Group,” says Thorsten Dirks, member of the executive board of Deutsche Lufthansa and chief of Eurowings.

Deepak Krishnamurthy – CEO of SAP – said the partnership offered up an exciting challenge to reinvent the traveller experience.

“With our industry-leading SAP Leonardo Blockchain platform and Lufthansa’s market leadership and expertise in Aviation, we can foster a new innovation ecosystem that can potentially transform the entire travel industry,” he said.

The best ideas will firstly be nominated for the mentoring programme, which begins in September.

The challenge has three categories:

1. Traveller challenge

This category is for schemes aimed at findings ways to provide added value for travellers from booking to loyalty programmes and airport identification.

2. Airline challenge

The objective here is to find ways to improve airline specific operations and related processes, such as the sharing of data across company and departmental areas.

3. Supplier challenge

This is about ideas to rethink maintenance and associated aspects of the aviation supply chain, including document tracking and digitisation to the transparent verification of documentation.