Enhancing the customer experience
United Airlines is the world’s largest airline by available seat miles and has one of the most comprehensive networks in North America. Over the last year the airline provider has adopted Sitecore composable technology to transform the airport experience for travelers. Sitecore currently powers 1,800 digital signs reaching a global audience of over 35 million every year. In a move to enhance the passenger experience, United Airlines wanted to streamline content authoring and delivery, and expand personalized service capabilities across the many variations of gate information displays. For instance, given the airline’s global footprint, multilingual support was becoming a must-have for passengers. The challenge was delivering variable, personalized content to thousands of digital signs across airports worldwide, enabling United Airlines to give its passengers the most advanced airport gate and curate a bespoke end-to-end travel experience.
Single source of truth
Under its Gate of the Future strategy, United Airlines has teamed up with Sitecore and its business partner Americaneagle.com, to migrate its existing Sitecore DXP solution to a composable and headless cloud environment incorporating Sitecore XM Cloud, Sitecore CDP, and Sitecore Personalize, delivered through Vercel. United Airlines used Sitecore360 — a success plan that gives customers access to Sitecore experts and resources to maximize the value of their Sitecore investment — to accelerate deployment and optimize delivery.
Sitecore CDP unifies data from multiple sources to create a single view and single source of truth for delivering highly personalized and targeted customer experiences. Sitecore XM Cloud includes Sitecore Pages, a low/no code visual authoring tool and a drag and drop WYSIWYG editor that makes it fast and easy for content authors to build components and other UIs. For instance, Sitecore enables streamlined content playlists which lower the overall day to day efforts of content management. Sitecore also powers airport digital signage that provides real-time information to other airport staff like baggage handlers.
Resounding customer approval
Improvements delivered on Sitecore’s composable DXP, such as enhanced personalization and multilingual support, have received resounding approval from United Airlines customers. Both English and non-English speaking travelers praised these new features and found them useful, while 82% of non-English speaking customers said they made the traveling experience easier. This has increased passenger trust in United Airlines, resulting in better travel experiences and improving operations.
This is just the start of United Airlines’ much wider digital signage transformation using Sitecore as a foundation for further improvements. For example, content will become more dynamic and detailed with timely delay information to lessen travel stress and create memorable experiences. Within a year, United Airlines expects Sitecore to support up to 4,000 digital signs across United Airlines hub airports and other airports worldwide, with enhancements such as multilingual support and United Airlines flight and travel content displayed on common-use signs.