Industry
Travel and Logistics
Data and AI in Travel Industry for a Memorable Passenger Experience
HIGHLIGHTS
- A static way of working with fixed check-in counters, security lanes, and immigration desks hampers the smooth flow of passengers through airports.
- With the help of technology and real-time process optimization, airports can optimize passenger flow to ensure seamless passenger experience.
- They can achieve this by focusing on four key aspects: predicting passenger flow better, having real-time visibility on changing demand, allocating resources dynamically, and staggering passenger arrivals.
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Focus on improving service
A long wait at the airport can mar the experience of a passenger looking forward to a joyful flight.
Airports need to focus their resources on ensuring seamless passenger experience. It’s little wonder then that staff at immigration, security screening counters are stretched to the hilt while endeavouring to offer a pleasant experience to travellers.
Is there a better way for airports to manage the flow of passengers through the airport? Can airports work with their aviation partners to recommend an optimal time for the arrival of passengers at the airport? What can the airport do to ensure the workforce across different touchpoints are empowered to deliver the “service” expected of them consistently?
Stakeholder experiences
There is a growing trend among airports to influence the experiences of the traveler.
The different partners, ie airlines, ground handling agents (GHA), and concessionaires, the workforce, immigration, security, and customs departments. The ultimate objective is to provide a seamless and connected travel experience that is worthy of the passenger’s time and money.
To ensure such a seamless engagement, airport operator should take control of the experiences of passengers, airport community stakeholders, and retail and food and beverage partners. There are challenges galore, of course. There is, for instance, reluctance to share data across enterprises, technical limitations for sharing data across the travel partners community, concerns of data security, anti-competition clauses, and the safety of enterprise business intelligence.
Frictionless passenger experience
As each passenger’s travel needs differ, all stakeholders must contribute towards multiple aspirations.
From ‘Instagram-worthy’ memorable journey to a rejuvenating one, an experience of joy that stems from the reunion of friends and family, or hassle-free means of getting from one place to the other. Several organizations need to come together to deliver these aspirations and expectations.
Enhance operational efficiency
Airports, however, are constrained by varying demands on their resources.
They seek opportunities to enhance their operational outcomes. Enhanced operational efficiencies contribute towards a seamless passenger experience by reducing wait times at different touchpoints-- check-in, security, bag drop.
Efficient collaboration among stakeholders helps drive punctual flight departures, leading to a positive impact on passenger experience. Delays and disruptions cause service standards to drop, resulting in frayed nerves, and heightened levels of stress and anxiety for passengers.
Airports play a pivotal role in delivering operational efficiencies through innovative thinking and by adopting new-age technologies. Optimizing the flow of passengers is critical in this endeavor.
4 cornerstones to optimize passenger flow
Streamlining passenger experience is, therefore, an essential responsibility of the airport operator.
One way to achieve this is to ensure ease of travel through the airport with minimal wait times at the touchpoints. Optimizing the flow of passengers with appropriate resources at check-in, bag drop, security, and immigration counters is key to reduced wait times and a perceived level of comfort.
A static way of working with fixed check-in counters, security lanes, and immigration desks at border control hamper the smooth flow of passengers through airports. This fixed way of working in busy airports with space and resource constraints may not always be conducive to respond to changes in demand.
Effective management of the flow of passengers requires: a) an understanding of the different arrival times of the passengers at the airport, b) evaluating the time it takes them to complete essential processes like check-in, bag drop, security checks, c) ascertaining the number of active resources like check-in desks, security lanes, immigration officers that are required, d) predicting the touchpoint resource requirements based on historical patterns, e) performing what-if/if-what simulations for situations that might evolve during the day, and f) delivering these insights to relevant stakeholders in a timely manner to augment decisions with systemic intelligence.
Airports should focus on four key elements as cornerstones in their approach to solve this problem.
- Prediction of pax flow: Using historical data and information of flight loads shared by airlines, AI models predict demand across the different airport touchpoints by hour of the day, leading to optimal utilization of human and fixed resources of the airport. Further, simulation capabilities can play a transformative role in creating passenger flow models that analyze and predict passenger movements and behaviors in real time.
- Real-time visibility of changes in demand: Shifts in flight timings lead to unplanned surges in demand. The airport’s solution should integrate with existing people counting sensors, leverage CCTV footage to provide real-time demand information required to the stakeholders to ensure resilience and efficiency in operations.
- Predict resource allocation: With information of the demand and knowledge of touchpoint constraints, the solution can recommend an optimal resource allocation to meet the demand, ensuring an acceptable level of service. Predictive modeling through AI enables proactive decision-making, ensuring a smoother, more efficient passenger experience while minimizing operational costs. An agentic framework with a multi-agent architecture can help ramp up or down any part of the airport asset while keeping the key performance indicators (KPIs) within acceptable limits. This also makes it easy to add or remove touchpoints and model their behaviour separately.
- Recommend the time of arrival to manage flows: Determining the arrival profile of passengers coming into the airport is largely based on visual observations. For some flights, queues form way before the check-in starts, while for others, passengers turn up as the check-in desks open. Some other airlines have a large percentage of business, frequent travellers who choose to come just in time for their flights. How can the arrival profile of passengers reaching the airport be managed differently? Can the airport recommend passengers the arrival time by category--families with children, passengers with additional service needs like PRMs (persons with reduced mobility), passengers wanting to spend additional time at the airport browsing the shopping areas, passengers who want to just go through the gates and board the flight, others who travel with minimal bags? What would have to change in the ways of working today for this to become a reality? Based on the predicted of level of service required at different touchpoints and awareness of the ideal way to manage stakeholder expectations, another strategy airports can implement is to recommend a staggered time of arrival for flights based on passenger needs.
Facilitating a happy journey
The four cornerstones can contribute to the airport’s ability to overcome current challenges and offer seamless passenger experience.
It will also help them comply with regulatory standards and align their operations to the ecosystem-wide business objectives.
With this transformed way of working, airports can help passengers experience a happier journey through the airport with less time spent in queues. They will have a much better visibility of wait times and congestion at different touchpoints. Airport partners, too, benefit from early visibility of what their staffing levels ought to be.
