In 2010, nearly 91 million passengers took more than a million flights of the Lufthansa Passage Airline Group to Lufthansa destinations across the world. The previous year, the figures were 77 million passengers and 100,000 flights less. Based on these figures, one can easily guess the level of performance to which the computer centers at Deutsche Lufthansa AG must measure up, both today and tomorrow, to ensure that route planning, pricing, reservations and passenger check-in functions smoothly with all of the partners involved. Given the task involved, an update of the legacy systems, in some cases in use for up to 30 years, was out of the question: that would have resulted in high costs without delivering the desired networking with Star Alliance partners.
Lufthansa decided to outsource data handling and switched over to the multiple-airline common IT platform offered by service provider Amadeus. Amadeus operates and continues to develop this platform to this day. Most of the 27 partners in the Star Alliance network intend to take this same step in the years to come. Their common goal is to store connections and passenger data of all partners in a common IT system. This way, if necessary—such as when a passenger on a long-haul itinerary with a layover switches from Lufthansa to Singapore Airlines—there is no longer any need for data interchange, and airline staff has direct access to all the information they need. This provides multiple airline partners the capability for even smoother passenger check-in, better service and efficient billing formalities in the background.