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.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.