Narita’s Face Express a good example of enhanced passenger experience
The single biggest trend that will impact airports in the next few years is the evolution of the passenger experience, said Sarah Samuel, Senior Vice President, Airport & Airline Operations, APAC Amadeus.
Speaking at WiT Japan & North Asia, Samuel, who’s had a long career in airports, working with SITA, and now with Amadeus for the past 10 years, said, “I think we all agree that Airports (and Airlines) are on the cusp of a major digital transformation – driven in large part by changing passenger expectations. We now expect our travel booking and travel services to be as easy and digitally enabled as ordering on Amazon, listening on Spotify or binge-watching on Netflix.
“We anticipate that we will see significant ‘digitization’ of services across the travel ecosystem – meaning that passengers will increasingly arrive at the airport knowing not only that they are ‘ok to board’, but ‘ok to depart the country’ and ‘ok to enter the next/destination country’.
“This will change the Airport experience – from ‘verification and authorization’ to ‘service delivery’ – allowing airports and airlines to innovate and collaborate on services – e.g., off-airport bag drop services, fast track or family track services, concierge shopping, extra care of people with physical and mental disabilities, etc.”
However, some things will remain the same, she noted.
“We will predominantly still want to travel with our luggage, we still need to be security screened, and we will still need to board aircraft, which may suffer disruptions/delays. All of these ‘experiences’ or ‘services’ are best delivered at scale via the Airport infrastructure.”
And with demand for air travel still projected to double within 20 years from the 2019 baseline, she said, “In that context, we will see far more digitally enabled ‘options’ in the airport passenger experience to satisfy this demand.”
This includes:
- Off-airport/digital check and travel authorization – all via your mobile phone.
- Biometrics for identity verification and touchpoint passenger servicing, for example, automatic identification at the kiosk and bag drop, security gates, boarding, etc.
- More intuitive self-service at the airport
- Hopefully the disappearance of paper bag tags in favor of permanent, RFID-enabled smart tags, that keep the passenger/airline/airport informed of the bag’s location and journey requirements.
“And if we can achieve that, we should see the reduction and retirement of kiosks within the passenger terminal, leading to more space within the airport for shopping, entertainment and other services.”
From left: Yeoh Siew Hoon (Founder, WiT), Sarah Samuel (Senior Vice President, Airport & Airline Operations, APAC
Amadeus), Jongyoon Kim (Managing Director/ Co-CEO Yanolja Cloud), Timothy O’Neil-Dunne (Principal, T2Impact) discussing travel trends during the New Tech Changing Travel session at WiT Japan & North Asia 2023
Commenting on the use of biometrics which is increasingly in use at airports, Samuel said, “A few things stand out that we need to address to ensure wide-scale adoption and therefore ensure that stakeholders will benefit from the investment.
“Respect for privacy and valid use of PII data – use of biometrics has to be driven by passenger consent and there needs to be a clear understanding on what data is collected and shared and how long it is retained.
“This is best addressed by the passenger electing to share their biometric information via the mobile phone; we cannot see that changing. Perhaps the widespread adoption of biometric-enabled loyalty programs such as Clear will change this model but not for all travelers.
“The second point to note is that in order to drive the adoption of biometrics and ensure a seamless passenger journey from curb-to-gate – the biometrics needs to be integrated into the Airline’s check-in flow and Departure Control System (DCS).
“By this, I mean that biometric bag drop or boarding cannot be performed by a ‘data extract’ from the DCS which is what we see happening with many airport biometric solutions today. At Amadeus we are focused on the tight integration of biometrics into the Airline DCS processes to ensure interoperability between the different Airport biometric solutions.”
Asked to cite an example of an airport in Japan that’s investing in automation in light of manpower shortage and an aging population, she cited Narita with its implementation of self-service followed by the integration of the OneID biometric solution on this self-service platform – “what Japan has branded Face Express”.
“Based on the success of this implementation, we see other customers of ours within Japan following NRT’s lead. Automation puts the passenger more in control and can allow airports to shift focus more on services for those who need them.
“Biometrics has the potential to simplify the passenger journey and reduces the need to produce physical documents (passport, visa, health certificates, boarding passes, etc.) at each airport touchpoint.”
Asked her opinion on how super apps such as Yanolja are working on innovations around packaging – for example, Yanolja Cloud’s CEO Jongyoon Kim called out the trend of “new packaged travel product combined with entertainment like musical, concerts and sports”, Samuel observed, “The ‘app space’ is certainly an area to watch. There are a number of service providers, like Uber, that are heavily invested in building the ‘super app’ that does everything for the customer.
“We think that the likes of Uber will face stiff competition in the travel space from brands like BA, LH or AA, who we know are determined to build out their digital service offering to their passengers – and take their service offerings well beyond flight bookings.
“The challenge that app providers like Uber will face in terms of travel is that reducing friction in travel is hard and the back-end systems are complex. We certainly see a future role for companies like Amadeus being the ‘platform enablers’ to other digital travel service providers.”
And as for how generative AI could impact airports, Samuel said, “The more interesting use cases for us will be around resource optimization and predictive analytics at scale. For example, how can we use this technology to more effectively predict disruption and then help to recover operations at an Airline network/schedule level, at an Airport Hub level and at an individual passenger level.”
Samuel also sees far more scope for collaboration between airports and the rest of the industry with the “coming digital transformation of Airlines and Airports”.
“A simple example is the list of services provided by an airport – how could we digitally enable those services to be available within the digital booking channels for all airlines that operate from the airport – and therefore – for all travel agents that book travel packages for passengers.
Where will this collaboration start? Based on our conversations with Airports and Airlines, we think the collaboration will start with the sharing of data and services as part of disruption management/service recovery.”
She also sees use cases for AR and VR in the airport wayfinding. “Using VR technology, we can ‘walk’ through the airport check-in, departure and transfer process. And using AR technology we can ‘guide’ the passenger through the complexity of large airport terminals to ensure efficient on-time transfers and departures.”
For the tech she wished would go fast forward, she cited two inter-related technologies. “The first is multi-modality – how can we make travel as easy and as friction-free for passengers across their entire journey – from leaving home, to airport, to destination and return.
“If we can do that well, we will also go a long way to improving the sustainability of our travel industry – the climate change mandates that we travel with more intention, derive more value from our travel opportunities – but also with much less CO2 footprint. Using public transport and other shared services – like rail – is one way that we can look to achieve that.”
She concluded, “For us, we are accelerating the digital transformation of Airlines and Airports. That is the ‘easy part’ – software in the cloud is much easier than where we have been before – which highlights our biggest challenge or task – which is how do we enable our Airline and Airport customers to bridge this technology gap from where they are today to where they will be tomorrow, while maintaining highly resilient operations. That is our focus.”
