The Lufthansa group has chosen Barcelona to open its first digital subsidiary in southern Europe. The center has the support of the Catalan company Quantion through a service contract signed with the German company and has already started operating. For now, it employs forty professionals with a technological profile who develop solutions to facilitate the flight experience of passengers, but the forecast is to incorporate up to 300 workers in the next two years.
In this way, it will become the second largest Lufthansa innovation center in Europe, only behind the hub that the group has located in Gdansk (Poland), Christian Spannbauer, Lufthansa's director of Digital Technology, highlighted during the presentation of the project. this Monday at the headquarters of the Acció de la Generalitat agency. "This new technology center reinforces the Catalan productive fabric and helps us attract more investment", underlined the Minister of Business and Labor, Roger Torrent.
The pandemic crisis has accelerated the digitization of airlines, which have pushed their technology into overdrive to adapt to an increasingly unpredictable environment. "Technological services to passengers make the difference", recognized Spannbauer. The Barcelona center will design solutions to improve reservations, trip management or customer service and will be integrated into the Digital Hangar of the German group, which currently has a thousand professionals spread across its subsidiaries in Brussels, Frankfurt, Gdansk, Vienna and Zurich, and to which Barcelona is now added.
The Catalan company that will operate the digital hub in Barcelona, Quantion, was founded in 2015 and has a staff of more than 120 technology professionals to help companies that want to accelerate their digital transformation projects. Its CEO, Jordi Griful, explained that in addition to helping Lufthansa in the selection of personnel and the administrative processes to open the Barcelona branch, they will collaborate to find new offices for the center. The German group had a list of 65 companies from different countries to develop the hub. In the election of Barcelona, its technological ecosystem has weighed.
