Rising expectations and fragmented airline systems
Airline customer experience has entered a period of accelerated change. Passengers expect journeys to reflect digital experiences across other industries - seamless, personalised, and supported by real‑time information. The latest IATA Global Passenger Survey confirms that convenience, speed and digital-first engagement dominate passenger priorities. Travellers overwhelmingly book through online channels, with 71% choosing digital booking methods and more than half preferring to interact directly with the airline’s own digital platforms. They also increasingly expect airport processes to move faster, with strong interest in biometrics and digital identity to reduce waiting times. These insights echo broader behavioural shifts, including a rapid rise in mobile use throughout the journey and a desire for transparent, easily accessible information at all stages.
Yet despite these rising expectations, most UK airlines continue to rely on a patchwork of legacy systems spanning reservations, customer service, airport operations, loyalty and third‑party partners. Data remains locked in silos, creating an inconsistent and reactive service. While passengers demand joined‑up experiences, the underlying operational architecture remains disjointed. This fragmentation becomes especially visible during disruption events, where slow communication, unclear options, and overloaded contact channels amplify frustration.
Operational pressure continues to mount. SITA’s 2024 Air Transport IT Insights report shows airline IT investment has surged to record levels, hitting an estimated $37 billion in 2024, signalling an industry wide recognition that current systems cannot keep pace with the scale of travel demand and the expectations of modern travellers. Cybersecurity and data platform modernisation rank among the top priorities for both airlines and airports, while biometrics and AI are rapidly gaining traction as essential enablers of future processing efficiency.
Layered on top of this operational complexity is a tightening regulatory environment. The UK Civil Aviation Authority requires airlines to provide clear communication, timely assistance, and care during delays, cancellations and denied boarding. Airlines must offer transparent information about rights, rebooking, refunds and welfare support. At the same time, efforts to adopt more automated or biometric enabled processes must comply with UK GDPR. The Information Commissioner’s Office states that biometric data is special category personal data requiring explicit consent and a justified lawful basis for processing. European authorities echo this position: the European Data Protection Board’s 2024 opinion on biometric identity explicitly warns against centralised storage models that remove control from passengers, advocating instead for architectures where biometric templates remain under user control to align with GDPR obligations.
The combined result is a strategic challenge. UK airlines must meet sharply rising expectations for personalisation and seamless service while navigating fragmented legacy systems and regulatory scrutiny. This environment demands a trusted transformation partner, one capable of unifying systems, orchestrating processes, and integrating technology within a compliant, customer centred design.
Sopra Steria steps into this space as the overarching delivery partner, bringing structure, clarity, and a unified transformation roadmap.
Building the future of customer experience
A customer-centric approach begins with recognising that modern airline customer experience cannot be improved through channel‑specific upgrades or isolated system enhancements. It requires a holistic, end‑to‑end re‑architecture of how data, people, and processes work together. Transformation is co-ordinated across business design, data strategy, integration, change management, and regulatory governance, ensuring every component is aligned to a unified vision.
At the core of the solution is the creation of a single, continuously updated Passenger 360 view. Using a platform like Salesforce Data Cloud, you can unify data from reservations, loyalty platforms, customer service channels, mobile apps, operational systems, and airport processes into one intelligent profile. This aligns directly with the model adopted by Air India, which used Salesforce to consolidate siloed data sources, including loyalty, booking, contact centre and operational systems into a cohesive view accessible in real time by frontline teams.
Building on this foundation, is the redesign of engagement into a dynamic, predictive, and personalised journey. Digital experiences become fully tailored, adapting to context, behaviour, and real‑time operational events. Messaging becomes timely and meaningful rather than generic, supporting everything from pre‑travel preparation to in airport guidance and post flight engagement.
For airport and onboard operations, ground and cabin crews can access passenger history, loyalty information, service records, and personalised insights directly in the flow of work using a service platform like Salesforce Service Cloud. Air India has demonstrated how powerful this model can be: with AI assisted recommendations and a unified service console, agents deliver faster, more consistent and more contextual service across every channel. Such a unified service console is possible in the UK airline environment, integrating it with airport systems, disruption platforms and crew devices.
Disruption management, historically one of the most painful friction points in aviation, becomes significantly more responsive when integrating operational data with dynamic rebooking rules, compensation eligibility and communication workflows. Disruptions are handled proactively instead of reactively. Automation can be deployed to issue rebooking options, digital vouchers and welfare entitlements instantly, reducing call-centre surges and empowering passengers to self-serve. Industry examples show that conversational AI and rule-based automation can reduce contact volumes by up to 60% during irregular operations while improving satisfaction and meeting UK CAA requirements for care, transparency and passenger rights.
Strategic partnership
The competitiveness of UK airlines will increasingly be determined not by physical expansion or incremental operational fixes, but by their ability to create seamless, personalised, and resilient digital led experiences. As digital maturity becomes a core differentiator, airlines must unify data, orchestrate service across every touchpoint, and deliver proactive, predictive engagement that builds loyalty and trust. These demands align directly with the insights emerging from global passenger research, which highlights passengers’ desire for speed, transparency, personalisation, and digital identity driven convenience. SITA’s findings similarly emphasise the industry’s pivot toward AI, biometrics, cybersecurity, and modern data platforms as strategic necessities.
Sopra Steria provides the strategic leadership and delivery capability UK airlines require to meet this moment. As the overarching transformation partner, Sopra Steria brings together customer journey design, integration expertise, regulatory alignment, organisational change, and long-term value realisation. Salesforce is the technology platform Sopra Steria chooses because it offers the most powerful, proven, and aviation ready capabilities for creating unified passenger profiles, orchestrating real‑time personalisation, empowering crews, managing disruption, and scaling AI responsibly.
Domain expertise
With deep domain expertise, Sopra Steria ensures regulatory compliance and trust by embedding GDPR compliant data governance, explicit consent biometric pathways aligned with ICO and EDPB guidance, and robust human in the loop oversight for high impact decisions. Salesforce’s secure cloud and role-based access controls support this governance, but Sopra Steria defines, implements, and monitors these controls to ensure alignment with both UK regulatory expectations and the airline’s internal risk appetite.
Sopra Steria’s delivery also includes operational transformation, aligning organisational structures, updating service processes, designing crew training, and creating a culture of data‑driven service excellence. The implementation is phased to deliver rapid value: initial stages focus on disruption and crew enablement, while later phases extend into loyalty personalisation, airport process enhancement, digital identity pilots, and analytics driven improvement. The entire programme is governed through clear KPIs spanning customer satisfaction, operational efficiency, revenue impact, digital adoption, and regulatory compliance, benchmarked against industry trends highlighted in SITA and IATA research.
Ultimately, the combination of Sopra Steria’s transformation leadership and Salesforce’s platform capabilities replace fragmented operations with a unified, intelligent ecosystem capable of delivering the personalised, seamless, and resilient experience UK passengers now expect.
Together, this combination allows UK airlines to unlock virtual capacity, reduce friction, strengthen loyalty, and build service experiences that match the expectations of todays and tomorrow’s travellers. With Sopra Steria guiding the transformation and Salesforce powering the digital core, UK carriers can achieve a step change in customer experience without waiting for new infrastructure, enabling them to compete and thrive in the next chapter of aviation.
Selected references
IATA Global Passenger Survey 2024: passenger preferences for convenience, digital booking, biometrics, and payment. [iata.org], [iata.org]
SITA Air Transport IT & Passenger IT Insights 2024: investment levels; priorities in AI, cybersecurity, biometrics; passenger comfort with DTCs and queue‑time expectations. [sita.aero], [sita.aero]
Air India x Salesforce: unified data platform, AI‑assisted service across touchpoints. [salesforce.com], [salesforce.com]
UK CAA passenger‑rights guidance: communications and assistance obligations during delays and cancellations. [gov.uk]