Customer Award

United Airlines Logo 2024

United Airlines delivers personalized travel experiences with Sitecore

Timely messaging and language personalization praised by English and Spanish speaking customers for making critical travel information more accessible.

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Category Winner

Best Use of Data to Connect the Experience

9

CMS’ consolidated onto one Sitecore platform

1,800

Sitecore-powered digital signs

>35m

passengers interact with United Airlines digital signage a year

82%

Of surveyed Spanish-speaking customers that noticed the translations, said that it eased their travel experience

66%

Of surveyed English-speaking customers praise better personalization, translated language features

Project brief

United Airlines customers want to feel informed and in control of their airport experience to make travel as stress-free as possible. To make critical travel information accessible to all, United Airlines provides translated and personalized boarding information for Spanish-speaking customers with the help of Sitecore. Digital signs display a host of real-time information from departure time and stand-by information, to support videos to provide information about bags and boarding the flight. Flights to international destinations and select domestic routes receive translated signage, with color-coded static signs complementing digital ones. Such improvements, powered by Sitecore, not only transform the multilingual digital experience, they also increase self-service so customers can reach their destinations during delays and cancellations without needing to wait in long lines for multilingual agent support, transforming the physical experience in a crowded airport into a much smoother, faster, and easier one.

United Airlines airlplane flying

About

United Airlines

Travel and Hospitality

North America

Products

CDP

Personalize

XM

XM Cloud

Tech Stack

Sitecore360

Challenge

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 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 personalization 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 end-to-end travel experience.

Solution

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.

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.

Outcome

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. 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.

WHAT THEY SAID

Using Sitecore’s composable technology has helped United Airlines improve the quality, content, and efficiency of information delivered to millions of customers with better gate, self-service, and boarding experiences.

Charlie Hong.jpg

Charlie Hong

Product Owner

Digital Signage, United Airlines

Americaneagle.com

Americaneagle.com

Full-service global digital agency and proud to be an original Sitecore Platinum Partner