Real-time passenger data to create a personalized flying experience

The airline wanted to develop an in‑flight application that would aggregate and present passenger information to cabin crew to improve customer recognition and customer intelligence captured on board the flight.

The Challenge

The commercial aviation passenger market is characterized by high costs, fierce competition, and low margins. To gain an edge, airlines must deliver the best possible customer experience—personalized from booking through arrival.

The airline needed an in‑flight application that aggregated and presented passenger information to cabin crew to improve recognition and service. For example, the application could alert when a loyalty tier changed on a previous flight, enabling crew to tailor greetings and plans accordingly. Previously, this contextual information wasn’t available without manual intervention.

To obtain approval, the team had to build a prototype quickly for a small trial. The application needed to draw information from various systems and silos while meeting strict data security requirements. The data platform had to be cost‑effective, scale to meet demand peaks, and deliver data globally in milliseconds. Initially, access was targeted to about 1,000 cabin crew managers, with future expansion to other customer‑facing staff.

Why Amazon Web Services

To avoid lengthy capital expenditure approvals for a proof of concept, the airline chose Amazon Web Services (AWS) for its scalability, transparency, and mature security model. We experience iterated and tested multiple big data solutions to fit the business objectives.

The solution leveraged Amazon EC2 for compute elasticity and Amazon S3 for durable storage, with a columnar analytics database and automated integrations orchestrated by cloud‑native tools. Redundancy and failover ensured high availability.

The Benefits

The airline achieved rapid prototyping and deployment, rolling out a pilot within 12 weeks and scaling access to crew across domestic and international flights. The application captures issues proactively so customer care can resolve them before contact, and reliability approaches 100% availability.

Next steps included expanding access to other customer‑facing roles and further leveraging AWS scalability to meet demand without significant cost increases.