Supporting Door-to-Door Air Travel: Towards a Privacy Preserving Virtual Assistant for Passengers

Abstract

Seamless and personalised door-to-door air transport, supported by virtual assistants, has the potential to make air travel more convenient and profitable. However, processing passengers’ data comes with major privacy concerns. Commercial interests and functionalities need to be reconciled with data protection. Current concepts do not meet these requirements. Filling this gap, this paper conceptualises an architecture for a travel assistant that mediates between mobility and air transport providers as well as passengers while assuring privacy through local computation. The concept targets a time horizon of 10+ years and addresses steady growth of air passenger volume (post-Covid) with a technical solution that includes an open, modular platform. The proposed architecture can support business advantages like network effects, the improvement of passengers’ overall travel experience, and a new approach that ensures traveller’s privacy online. Further research and the development of a prototype are necessary for first simulations and implications.