Future of customer experience in airports: ACI Customer Experience Global Summit

Representing Amazon Web Services (AWS), I had the privilege of attending Airports Council International (ACI) World’s Customer Experience Global Summit held in partnership with Kraków Airport. I participated in a panel with airport industry leaders to discuss what can be done to improve the customer experience and to hear their vision for the future.

For over 20 years, I have worked closely with travel and hospitality customers to implement their visions. I’ve helped them innovate, design, and plan their technology strategies. And I’ve helped them build complex technology platforms with proven business value. Today, as a technology lead for travel and hospitality in EMEA for AWS, I help airlines, airports, hotels, cruises, and travel Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) use AWS Cloud to meet their business goals, including improving the customer experience.

In this blog, I share my key learnings from the conference and how AWS is helping airports and other customers with similar visions and challenges.

1. Customer experience is key to gaining customer loyalty

Today, almost all loyalty programs have threshold requirements that customers are required to meet before they can enjoy special privileges, such as free access to the lounge and other rewards. One speaker explained how airports can flip this norm by first showing customers that they are important and their experience matters, which will eventually drive more customer loyalty. The grand vision is to make the airport a destination itself.

Another session underlined the need to focus on employee experience as one of the factors for a better customer experience. Airport employees are at the forefront of customer interactions at the airports and their work experience is something that we cannot lose sight of.

Like the speakers, I believe airports can improve customer experience and loyalty by working backward from the customer’s needs. Understanding each customer segment—its unique needs and how to cater to them—puts customers first, rather than requiring them to meet thresholds.

A common traveler segment is gate huggers, those who arrive at the gate early and won’t leave before boarding. With the right data and operational forecasting, these passengers can be called to the gate at the optimal time. This allows passengers to shop and relax in the terminal while improving airports’ retail revenues.

Greater Toronto Airports Authority (GTAA) has collaborated with Wipro, an AWS Premier Consulting Partner, to develop and deploy a new solution called Passenger Queue System (PQS). Using this system, passengers can scan a QR code at the gate upon arrival and enjoy the freedom to eat, shop, or relax while staying up to date with the boarding process, optimizing the boarding process and retail revenue.

By working backward from the customers, airports are trying to improve the customer experience for another segment: those with varying accessibility needs. Presenters said:

1. Accessibility cannot be an afterthought.
2. Consult customer user groups with special needs and accessibility consultants so that the airport is accessible for all. “You need to be in a wheelchair to understand the challenges that people in a wheelchair go through.”

AWS works with Partners that offer passengers with reduced mobility (PRM) solutions and others that help airports become more accessible. Kone Corporation, a global leader in the elevator and escalator industry, has created an indoor navigation app specialized for visually impaired people so that they can seamlessly connect and control elevators. Kone Corporation’s Connected API Platform is hosted on AWS and can be extended to airport indoor-navigation apps.

Ostrum Tech has built a cloud-native platform on AWS that lets airlines, airports, and service providers share data to provide an optimal experience for travelers with special needs. By bringing passengers, assistance staff, cabin crew, and boarding agents together, the platform bridges communication gaps, provides predictability, and reduces traveler stress, leading to a better customer experience. Travelers get an Uber-like experience in which they have information about the whole experience, including anticipated processes, timelines, and people assigned to support them.

2. Need to integrate data and processes across the system partners

A typical customer journey in airports spans beyond organizational borders. This necessitates the need for the entire airport partner system—airports, border control, security, customs, airlines, retailers, and others—to integrate its processes, enhance visibility across organizational structures, and share data in a timely manner within the legal remit of data sovereignty / residency, confidentiality, and other requirements, such as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).

ACI’s Aviation Community Recommended Information Services (ACRIS), sets the standard for information and data exchange in the aviation community. ACRIS defines a framework for airports, airlines, partners, and suppliers to share data across different companies and providers.

AWS provides a wide variety of services that facilitate storing and sharing data with relevant Partners on a need-to-know basis, with security controls such as authentication, authorization, and anonymization of data, if needed. Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) is an object storage service offering industry-leading scalability, data availability, security, and performance. Amazon Macie is a data security and data privacy service that uses machine learning (ML) and pattern matching to discover and protect sensitive data. AWS offers over 15 purpose-built database engines to support diverse data models, including relational, key-value, document, in-memory, graph, time-series, wide-column, and ledger databases. These databases help achieve performance at scale, are fully managed, and promote high availability and security. Amazon API Gateway is a fully managed service that makes it easy to create, publish, maintain, monitor, and secure APIs at virtually any scale. AWS Data Exchange makes it easy for AWS customers to securely exchange and use third-party data on AWS. Amazon EventBridge is a serverless event bus that lets users receive, filter, transform, route, and deliver events to their own applications or partner applications.

3. Data: Key foundation for the next-generation customer experience

Almost all the speakers and panelists echoed the need for ingesting, storing, processing, and sharing data within the airport system as well as the partner system. The need to collaborate between the airport system partners was mentioned repeatedly. But after that data is integrated, how can it be used?

Data being handled at airports is growing in volume, velocity, and variety. AWS offers services to ingest data, store it with the capacity to scale as needed, process it for analytics purposes, and run artificial intelligence (AI) and ML models for predictive use cases. Amazon Kinesis makes it easy to collect, process, and analyze near-real-time streaming data so users can get timely insights and react quickly to new information. Amazon S3 is usually the foundational service for data storage needs. Amazon Redshift uses SQL to analyze structured and semi-structured data across data warehouses, operational databases, and data lakes using AWS-designed hardware and ML to deliver optimal price performance at virtually any scale. Amazon Athena is an interactive query service that makes it easy to analyze data in Amazon S3 using standard SQL. Amazon Athena is serverless, so there is no infrastructure to manage, and users pay only for the queries that they run. AWS Lake Formation easily creates secure data lakes, making data available for wide-ranging analytics. Amazon QuickSight allows everyone in your organization to understand data by asking questions in natural language, exploring through interactive dashboards, or automatically looking for patterns and outliers, powered by ML. Amazon SageMaker helps users to build, train, and deploy ML models for virtually any use case with fully managed infrastructure, tools, and workflows.

The future of customer experience is just beginning

I returned from the ACI conference excited about the vision that airport industry leaders shared. I am ready to work with airports to build the next-generation customer experience and facilitate collaboration between all the partners in the system using the services and solutions that AWS offers.

If you’re interested in learning how migrating to the cloud can improve the customer experience, read the Airport Cloud Migration Journeys ebook.