Lufthansa has decided to locate an innovation center in Barcelona, the first it will have in Southern Europe. With the outbreak of the pandemic and the acceleration of the online universe, the German group, owner of airlines such as Lufthansa, Eurowings, Austrian Airlines, Brussels Airlines, and Swiss International Air Lines, created Digital Hangar, its digital unit, and began to create technological subsidiaries focused on finding new solutions for the airline industry. It started doing so in September 2022 and, with the one in the Catalan capital, it will reach its sixth headquarters, after those in Brussels, Frankfurt, Vienna, Zurich, and Gdansk, with a global workforce of about 1,000 employees.
The Barcelona center has already started operating and has 40 employees. The multinational's forecast is to reach up to 300 employees between 2024 and 2025. In line with the structure of the other centers it has spread across Europe, this maximum number of workers is not expected to be exceeded, Lufthansa emphasizes, preferring to maintain a center that is not too large to foster relationships between employees and preserve a work environment on a more controlled scale. The profiles the company is looking for are purely technological, such as software engineers, data analysts, UI and UX designers, business analysts, product managers, or solutions architects. They will dedicate themselves to digitalization projects in areas such as booking processes, customer service, or the creation of onboard digital portals that display personalized information to each passenger.
Lufthansa will land in Barcelona through the Catalan company Quantion, founded in 2015 to work with companies that want to accelerate their digital transformation projects. Quantion, with a workforce of more than 120 professionals, will be responsible for developing the headquarters, from finding offices and hiring staff to executing innovation projects that the aviation group wants to promote. "It's a great challenge," says its CEO, Jordi Griful. They expect to find the definitive space for the subsidiary early next year. Until they find it, they will work from Quantion's offices, located on Consell de Cent between Balmes and Rambla de Catalunya.
The selection process of the aviation group for its new technology subsidiary chose Quantion from among some 65 companies. Lufthansa was looking for a location complementary to the center it has in Poland, in Gdansk. The initial list was reduced to five companies and their fit as a partner was evaluated, but also the environment where they were located, taking into account factors such as access to talent and the degree of innovation, as well as air connections with Germany. In the case of the Catalan capital, it had five daily flights with Berlin. "Barcelona fits perfectly with our mission," says Digital Hangar's head of technology, Christian Spannbauer, "we are at the beginning of a journey."
Lufthansa's decision to establish itself in Barcelona has had the support of the Department of Business and Labor and Acció, the Agency for the Competitiveness of the Generalitat. "It is a project that places us at the forefront of Southern Europe," defends the Minister of Business and Labor, Roger Torrent. It will be a new digital hub that will join the almost 100 detected by Mobile World Capital Barcelona (MWCapital) in the Catalan capital, with more than 15,000 employees and an annual turnover of 1,400 million euros, a figure that has doubled in the last five years.