HANGAR 51 ACCELERATOR
Our leading global traveltech accelerator gives start-ups and scale-ups the opportunity to pilot their technologies at scale with our airlines.
Over 10 weeks, you’ll co-work with our teams to run a joint proof of concept to help us solve some of our biggest challenges. You’ll have access to real world operational environments, work with experts across the industry and receive support and guidance from a senior sponsor.
After the accelerator, many start-ups continue to work with us on further trials or to implement their solutions and benefit from a fast-tracked procurement process.
We've now accelerated 35 start-ups from around the world and you can find out more about them here.
WHY HANGAR 51?
- Fast-tracked proof of concept: pilot your solution within our airlines’ operational environments, from kick off to delivery in just 10 weeks
- Unparalleled access: to senior management and industry experts, and the chance to gain a deep insight into aviation operations
- Vital product feedback: to help you develop your proposition to add the most value to airline customers
- Commercial opportunity: to pitch for a fast-tracked contract if the pilot is successful and introductions to airlines across our Group
- Expanded network: connect with other traveltech founders in your cohort and benefit from valuable introductions to our industry partners such as airports and other airlines
WHO IS IT FOR?
We want to help start-ups take their business to the next level through our accelerator. To make sure you get the most out of the programme, we do have certain requirements we expect our participants to meet:
- Be able to commit to co-working with our team over the 10
week programme - Have a proof of concept as a minimum, so that we can deploy
and test it during the accelerator - Be open to receiving investment from IAG. Find out more
We recognise the challenges that particular groups of founders face when it comes to getting investment and growth opportunities for their start-ups so we’re actively seeking and encouraging applications from start-ups with diverse founding teams.
AREAS OF INTEREST
Now more than ever, there is a need for innovation within aviation to ensure sustainable and seamless travel for the future. We welcome applications from start-ups and scale-ups from around the world to help us bring new technologies to the following areas:
Contactless travel
The aviation industry has been testing new technologies to make the passenger journey through the airport easier, faster and more secure, and the current crisis has highlighted the need to speed up the pace of change to provide safe and secure travel.
We’d like to work with start-ups that can:
- Integrate with airport systems and remove touchpoints for a seamless travel experience for the customer, from leaving their house to arriving at their destination
- Keep passengers informed of any new safety and travel requirements
- Offer covid-related solutions, from smart masks to crowd monitoring
- Find new solutions to better manage and track baggage
- Offer contactless security screening technologies
- Manage and share passenger identity, contact information and preferences across the whole value chain without compromising privacy and security
Connected operations
We’re looking for new technologies that can help us improve performance, safety, efficiency and customer experience throughout our operations.
We’d like to work with start-ups that can help us:
- Bring a higher level of automation and efficiency into our operations
- Continue to digitise operations, for example by enabling our airport staff to service customers where they are using mobiles
- Explore how and where digital twins can add value to our business
- Tap into the rich data within our business to create better insights
- Operate in a truly connected way to improve information flow across processes and enable better decision-making
- Deliver a connected customer experience that cuts across our different airline brands and enables us to recognise and treat customers as IAG Group customers
New products and services
As travel restarts, we would love to hear from start-ups working on solutions that enable us to offer new services and experiences to our customers when they travel. Your solutions should be able to easily integrate into our existing infrastructure and help generate strong revenues and/or customer satisfaction.
Some of the ideas we’re interested in include:
- Identifying new ancillary revenue opportunities, including the commercialisation of our assets in new ways
- Finding ways to offer a multimodal end-to-end travel mobility experience from the moment you step out your door to arriving at your accommodation abroad
- Introducing pre-travel or in-seat ordering for products and services
- Offering more sustainable gastronomic experiences to passengers
- Enabling greater personalisation, choice and control through the customer journey and booking flow
- Innovation in payments to capture lost revenue opportunities
- Enabling a better experience for passengers with reduced mobility
Sustainability
In 2019, we became the first airline group in the world to commit to reaching net zero CO2 emissions by 2050. Though we are currently reliant on fossil fuels and the low carbon solutions for aviation are more complex than for many other sectors, we believe our ambitious goal is achievable and that new technologies will have a significant role to play.
We would love to hear from start-ups working on technologies that can:
- Capture and remove CO2 from our environment
- Help us reduce weight and waste onboard aircraft, particularly food waste and single use plastics
- Improve routing of air cargo to the most carbon efficient sectors
- Introduce electric/ low carbon vehicles for moving cargo
- Help us reduce energy and waste from our buildings, including alternatives to landfill, and increased usage of renewable energy
- Help us develop and finance natural solutions to meet climate and biodiversity goals
- Help increase awareness of impact amongst customers and suppliers, and help them support sustainable choices and projects
- Enhance our reporting capabilities to show progress against sustainability targets in a clear and consistent way
- Engage employees to track and offset their own carbon emissions
- Help find innovative ways to produce and store renewable energy
- Introduce more sustainable redemption options for Avios points
Loyalty
IAG Loyalty offers a wide range of loyalty services including the Avios currency, customer programmes, loyalty management tools, technology solutions, data and customer insights.
We’re looking to work with start-ups that:
- Can help us drive automation across the business to increase productivity, bringing a range of different tools together with traditional RPA solutions
- Can help us build products that are resilient to failure by design through the use of chaos engineering
- Have advanced contact centre related innovations in areas including compliance, fraud prevention and automation
- Can enable customers to redeem Avios points in an in-store environment at scale without time-consuming point-of-sale integrations, particularly in Spain
Cybersecurity
The cyber threat environment is a challenge for all organisations, including airlines, and we continue to prioritise investment in this space. We’re looking to partner with companies developing cutting-edge technology to help ensure our platforms remain resilient, scalable and secure.
We’d like to hear from start-ups that have expertise in:
- Asset management software
- Automatic detection of anomalous behaviour
- Protection of assets in the cloud
- Automation of response to malicious behaviour and the remediation of vulnerabilities
- Crisis management tools
Smarter working
We continue to invest in the digital transformation of our business to improve on legacy systems and processes and deliver greater value to our Group. We’d like to work with start-ups that can help us accelerate this process and equip our teams with the tools and data they need to become more efficient and enhance their decision making.
We’d love to hear from start-ups that can help us:
- Automate simple tasks going beyond robotic process automation, with the integration of AI and self-service technologies
- Launch tools to help our distributed teams work and collaborate from anywhere
- Help us harness zero code automation software to improve productivity
- Bring innovation and new technologies into back office processes such as document management
WILDCARD
We want to transform the way people travel over the next twenty years. If you’re working on technology that has the potential to reshape travel and aviation, we’d love to hear from you.
Timeline
APPLICATIONS OPEN
We review applications on a rolling basis so encourage you to apply early.
APPLICATIONS CLOSE
Please submit your application by midnight BST on Sunday 20th September. We'll let you know if you've been selected to pitch by Friday 2nd October.
PITCH WEEK
This is your chance to present your company to IAG’s senior leaders and the teams you could be co-working with on the accelerator. It will be virtual and you'll have 5 minutes to tell us more about your start-up and show the panel why they should select you for the accelerator.
ACCELERATOR BEGINS
Our 10-week, intensive collaboration begins! We will set out key objectives for the accelerator and you'll receive mentorship from a senior sponsor and support from experts across the business to help you towards these goals.
DEMO DAY
The accelerator wraps up with Demo Day, where you get to showcase and celebrate everything you've achieved and present your proposal for future engagement with IAG.