At your service: Cathay’s new customer service app

Airport customer service teams have been traditionally stuck behind counters – at check-in, boarding gates and transit desks. It’s there that they access Cathay Pacific’s check-in system, Customer Management (CM), to process passengers. For years, they could issue boarding passes, check visas and update flight details only from these fixed points. That is, until recently.

“We’ve developed an app that is essentially our entire check-in system on an iPad,” says Josh Rogers, Head of Airport Customer Service at Cathay. “It allows our frontline teams to be completely mobile around the airport, so they’re not constrained by being behind the desk.”

The app, CMAnywhere, is just one of the digital innovations the Cathay IT department has made to enhance the passenger experience. Working closely with a group of frontline airport teams from Hong Kong International Airport and around the Cathay Pacific network, they ideated, designed and built the app from the ground up.

After 11 months of development, the app was launched in October 2022 and has since been rolled out across 500 iPads worldwide – with more to come in 2024.

“We are the first airline to build an airport app on this scale,” says Anthony Chau, Senior Solution Lead at Cathay. While other airlines purchase off-the-shelf solutions, we wanted to create an app tailored to the specific needs of our airport customer service teams and passengers. And it had to be simple to use and easy to update.

The cloud platform proved to be the perfect place to host the app and support agile development. “It’s scalable with auto-deployment capabilities; any application roll-out takes less than 30 minutes,” says Fiona Cheung, Platform Ops Manager at Cathay. This enables the team to work in sprints, releasing updates to CMAnywhere every six to eight weeks.

Developing the app in-house also ensured a user experience that was consistent with other internal apps. This facilitated easy uptake by the airport teams, meaning there was no need for additional training. “One of our design principles here at Cathay is ‘make it easy for me’,” says Rogers. It’s an ethos we apply to our customer propositions, so it’s important we implement it for our people as well.

With all the necessary information on their iPads, our airport teams are no longer bound to the counters, giving them greater flexibility to help passengers wherever they need to be helped. This minimises queue times, reduces friction and ensures a swift and seamless experience. All of which are particularly important, especially when things don’t go to plan.

For instance, when a typhoon sweeps through the region, flight connections are missed, and passengers need to be rebooked. Previously, affected passengers would head to the transfer desk and wait in line to get a printed boarding pass for their new flight. With CMAnywhere, our frontline teams can now meet flyers at their arrival gate and, with just a few taps on the iPad, send a digital boarding pass directly to the passenger’s phone. Rebooking passengers on new flights, helping with seat changes and scanning passports are all just as easy.

“We’re going to the passenger, rather than the passenger coming to us. That’s what a good service brand does,” says Rogers. “Wherever they need our help, we will be there for them.”

With CMAnywhere now in use, the Cathay IT department is busy building the next app, which launches later this year. Our airport teams will soon join their inflight colleagues in having an app that delivers a wealth of passenger information, allowing them to provide personalised service experiences – whether they’re on the ground or in the air.

Digital innovations that help us help our passengers. It’s all part of our ambition to be one of the world’s greatest service brands.

This story was originally published in November 2023 and updated in January 2025.