Through its digital Innovation Hub in Berlin, which was founded in 2014, the airline group (Lufthansa, Austrian Airlines, Swiss and Eurowings) has been looking into new ways to expose its backend systems via APIs for third party developers.
First, it needed some help on the technical side, partnering with consultants from Mindtree to work on what the group calls the Open API initiative. ?Open API is an umbrella term within Lufthansa Group that refers to a broad range of APIs, both for internal and external use. It currently counts 900 or so registered developers, accounting for 210 million API calls in 2017.
Most recently this includes a booking API, which allows authorised third party developers to integrate the sale of airline tickets from those carriers into their own website or applications.
According to industry body IATA, Lufthansa is one of just 10 airlines, or 4% of its membership, offering an open API. This includes British Airways - part of International Airlines Group (IAG) - which also has a set of developer APIs for flight offers, the latest entertainment options and flight status. This does discount the fact that the booking API has been somewhat monopolised by flight aggregators like Skyscanner already, however.
This booking API is currently only available to early stage startups, ventures, or those new to air travel for Lufthansa flights from the UK, but Lufthansa is planning to gradually expand into more markets with the US earmarked next.
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