How to use passenger personas to maximize satisfaction & spending at your airport

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Airport passenger personas

If you travel through airports these days, chances are you have crossed the paths of the likes of Ben the businessman, stressed out Sally, Brian the backpacker or shopaholic Sharon. Except none of these are real passengers. They are examples of some of the personas (fictional representations of key user types) that airports are using to help design the sort of experience their passengers want.

In this article, we’ll look at the reasons why airports are using personas, how to create them for your airport (and the key pitfalls to avoid) as well as some examples of how using personas can help you improve your passenger experience and maximize sales. Continue reading →

The only 3 passenger surveys your airport needs

How to design a comprehensive research strategy for your airport on a tight budget

Tablet surveys

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Imagine you’ve just been given a clean slate to completely redefine your airport’s customer research strategy. You have finally convinced your colleagues that the best way to grow non-aeronautical revenue is to understand the type of airport experience your passengers want and deliver this for them. And now you need to create a research programme that will support that strategy. So where do you start?

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8 reasons why your passenger satisfaction scores aren’t increasing

A quick guide to surviving the dreaded “Why aren’t our scores increasing?” question

Obstacle-Course

Know that feeling? You are about to present the latest passenger research findings to your colleagues and the news is bad: satisfaction levels have not increased at all, or worse they have dropped despite the new customer service initiative you just implemented. And you don’t really know why. So you are just sitting there dreading the moment your boss will ask you point blank why satisfaction levels aren’t up, expecting a detailed answer from you.

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The golden rule for a great passenger experience

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“What special things are top airports doing in order to achieve such great satisfaction scores? Is it their shopping? Their staff? Artwork? Sense of place? etc… They must be doing something really different in order to score so much better than us.” I hear this quite a lot from airports seeking to increase passenger satisfaction levels.

So what is this special thing the top performing airports have? The more I travel and work with airports all over the world, the more I believe it comes down to 1 simple word: balance. Continue reading →

Managing stakeholders – lessons from a two year old

Angry toddler

I’ve got a two year old son. Like kids of his age he is starting to want to do things his own way – mainly things I don’t want him to it seems. And so I regularly find myself having to tell him “no”, “stop” or some other variation of the same theme.

While this approach worked at first it doesn’t seem to have the same effect any more. As soon as he gets over the initial surprise of me talking with a much louder voice he simply starts doing the same thing all over again with a smile on his face.

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Ambience – it’s not just a new terminal

After a while, clutter is unnoticed – bags of rubbish and mobility scooters left in plain sight in the terminal.

After a while, clutter is unnoticed – bags of rubbish and mobility scooters left in plain sight in the terminal.

For most airports, it is possible to significantly improve ambience without spending a large amount of money. To do this, you first need to get to grips with what causes poor ambience and then work on creating a great ambience.

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What airport managers can learn from vintage car enthusiasts

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Vintage cars

Let’s face it. Despite all you see in industry news about new terminals being built, the majority of airport facilities are not brand new. And for most airport managers, daily reality is working with facilities that were built years ago and designed with other passenger needs in mind.

This makes improving service quality challenging and it is tempting to simply give up and wait for a new terminal to be built and hope to see satisfaction levels go up. But older facilities don’t have to be problem and some airports are able to achieve high levels of passenger satisfaction despite their age.

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It’s all about the toilets

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How do you make airport toilets great?

One of the first things I was told when I started working with airports, was that ultimately passenger satisfaction is all about the toilets.

Washrooms at Seoul Incheon Airport

Washrooms at Seoul Incheon Airport

While it’s true that there is a general correlation between overall satisfaction and the toilet experience, what is very clear is that poor experiences in the toilets are often very strongly linked to passenger overall dissatisfaction. Therefore while it is good to have a great washroom experience, it is essential that the passenger does not have a bad experience.

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Is your quality management system holding you back?

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To improve service quality, airports generally focus on specific touchpoints – the critical moments when passengers interact with the airport and its services. The idea is that by improving certain key services the overall experience will be better. But is this really the best approach? I would argue not necessarily.

Hong Kong check-in hall

Passengers want airports to provide integrated and seamless experiences. The current touchpoint approach is ill-suited for this purpose because it places too much emphasis on individual processes & services at the expense of the big picture and doesn’t reflect what the passenger actually experiences. Rather, airports need to adopt a more holistic approach to managing service quality centred on the notion of passenger journeys.

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