Chief Data & Technology Officer Abdulgader Attiah on the digital transformation program towards becoming an ‘offer and order’ airline

By utilising technology to support new ways of doing business, and interacting with and supporting customers, Saudia Chief Data & Technology Officer Abdulgader Attiah sees a huge opportunity to bring the aviation industry to the next level. “It really inspires me and my team. Our ambition is to be the number one go-to airline digitally.”

Saudia’s Digital Transformation Strategy

Taking up his role as Chief Data & Technology Officer in 2023, Attiah saw an opportunity for his team to unite the business with technology. “We approached this in three phases,” he explains. “The foundation phase, the business development phase and the excel phase. Today we are completing the first phase, the foundation where you create the building blocks for success. We have focused on three major areas from a digital perspective: data transformation, digital transformation and back-office transformation. These three pillars provide the core engine of the next layer, where we cannot go and test the market as a retailer without having this foundation.”

Attiah and his team have taken huge steps, decoupling the architecture for digital to control the front end, and the business logic, keeping the backend at the vendor side. “We now have the agility we need – when we want to create and move products, we don’t have to go to vendors to create products for us, but we can create them ourselves.”

A customer-centric experience

Saudia’s customer digital experience transformation program is focused on ensuring the customer is at the heart of the airline’s decision making. “We are balancing commercial lead decisions with guest experience decisions. Some features will drive a lot of revenue, but we always aim to place continued emphasis on the guest. For example, right now we are launching auto check-in. We asked: Why do I have to check in? I have bought a ticket. I have a target date to fly. Why do I have to do that check-in step? No legacy airline has attempted to do that. With Saudia, you will be checked in from day one. And the reason for the check-in, if we go back in technology perspectives, is that there are multiple systems talking to each other. A reservation system and a departure control system handling the period a few days before departure. Currently, these two systems have to communicate with each other. We’re enabling auto check-in so our guests receive a boarding pass regardless of whether they ‘check-in’ or not. We’re elevating the guest experience