SriLankan Airlines partners with Mastercard for consumer insights and cybersecurity

From left: SriLankan Airlines Chief Executive Officer Richard Nuttall, Mastercard Sri Lanka and Maldives Country Manager Sandun Hapugoda, SriLankan Airlines Worldwide Sales and Distribution Head Dimuthu Tennakoon

SriLankan Airlines and Mastercard today announced their collaboration to enhance the operational efficiency and strengthen the cybersecurity posture of the country’s national carrier. 

The airline will be leveraging Mastercard’s Tourism Insights, a suite of data-driven tourism solutions that helps organisations understand consumer spending patterns, behaviours, and sentiments. Combining anonymised spending data with data from credible third parties, it identifies search trends, travel bookings and accommodations, social media insights and more, enabling companies to drive growth. 

By deploying such insights for enhanced route optimisation, SriLankan Airlines stands to gain a competitive advantage and a higher ROI on marketing activities, along with a larger market share. 

Similarly, the airline will be using Mastercard’s RiskRecon, a comprehensive vendor security monitoring solution tailored to align with an organisation’s risk policy. By simplifying the understanding of potential risks, it will enable SriLankan Airlines to closely assess the cyber hygiene of its systems and vendors. 

RiskRecon continuously monitors an enterprise’s vendors for compliance to the risk policy, making it easy for the company to understand and act on third-party risk. It powers the management team with the information needed to allocate assessment resources based on risk, so that they can prioritise resources to those performing poorly. Further, RiskRecon helps the enterprise to compare risk performance ratings of multiple vendors simultaneously, enabling it to select the service provider which best meets its risk performance requirements.

As part of the collaboration, SriLankan Airlines and Mastercard will also work towards curating and delivering exciting deals and discounts to cardholders, thereby enhancing their travel experience. 

SriLankan Airlines Chief Executive Officer Richard Nuttall said: “We are excited to collaborate with Mastercard to gain key consumer insights and cater to our passengers’ diverse needs by curating rich travel experiences for them. We also look forward to utilising Mastercard’s expertise in cybersecurity to ensure that our enterprise, partners, and vendors can enjoy safe and seamless operations.” 

Mastercard Sri Lanka and Maldives Country Manager Sandun Hapugoda said: “Mastercard has remained focused on bringing the latest in technology and innovation to Sri Lanka, offering advanced solutions to enterprises across sectors. While the Tourism Insights platform will enable the country’s national carrier to increase revenue and optimise costs, RiskRecon will ensure a safe cyber environment for its own systems and vendors. Through this collaboration, Mastercard and SriLankan Airlines will also create a unique value proposition for cardholders by providing them with exciting discounts and benefits.”