The Lufthansa RYDES Mobility App

Lufthansa’s Innovation lab division has in the past experimented with apps and solutions that work with competitors. One example is Airline Check-ins, an app and an automatic check-in service that checks travelers in for all airlines offering online check-ins.

You sign-up in the app for free and enter your travel documents, personal information and seating preferences.

Once the sign-up is completed, you can send in booking confirmations for upcoming flights. You are then automatically be checked.

However, you earn those points by taking a range of urban transportation methods. In particular, Rydes claims to be the first app in Europe to reward points for each journey with a digitally bookable mobility service.

These include car sharing bike sharing and eScooter sharing services not to mention public transport busses and trains. Kick scooters will be added soon.

Collecting and redeeming points for rewards works directly via the RYDES app: Users scan their digital tickets and RYDES books the points for each trip to their personal points account.

In addition to free minutes with mobility partners, the points can be put towards vouchers with the reward partners Eurowings, Amorelie, Tinder, ABOUT YOU, and Amazon.

Lufthansa says that users can also collect additional points via mobility challenges. In the “Up-in-the-Air Challenge,” users are rewarded with an instant reward if they upload a flight ticket from Eurowings, easyJet, or Ryanair.

We asked the Lufthansa Innovation team why they had included two competitors (Ryanair and easyJet) in their app. According to project leader René Braun:

RYDES is a loyalty program that focuses on themillennial traveller. Millennials tend to preferlow cost airlines over full service carriers, which is why we have decided to only add major lowcost carriers such as Eurowings, Ryanair andeasyJet to the beta version of RYDES.

It’s an intriguing concept from Lufthansa’s innovation team that positions the airline as a general transportation enabler. It’s able to download for iOS and Android.