Airport Experience® News - Customer Service Issue 2023

Collaboration between airports and stakeholders, ranging from concessions operators to the Transportation Security Administration, reached new levels during the pandemic as everyone worked together to ensure the survival of both individuals and businesses. Now, with the pandemic in the past, the industry solidly into recovery mode and technology advancing all the time, some airports are making a push to formalize and require data sharing going forward. Stakeholders aren’t necessarily saying no, but they have expressed concerns about just exactly what data is being shared and how the sharing takes place. They also want transparency and a two-way street. Good For The Experience One airport upping its efforts to improve the flow of data between partners is Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport (PHX) . Executives there say that information can positively influence the customer experience. “Transaction level customer data helps us better understand occupancies and customer preferences to ensure we are providing the right services to the right customers at the right time,” says Heather Shelbrack, deputy aviation director at PHX. “We strive to continuously improve the customer experience. We’re looking at the customer journey and want to produce a seamless experience for our customers. This data sharing will allow us to keep up with our customers’ expectations.” Helps With Efficiency While the country and industry are well into recovery from COVID, there are still labor shortages, capacity issues, difficulties in delivering flights on time, decreases in the availability of bonding and other challenges that trickle down into airports that are still getting back to normal. “That’s going to mean that some of these service pressures are going to stay with the industry for some time,” says Steve

Van Beek, director and head of North American aviation with Steer . “So, what that ultimately means is you’ve got to find a way to operate your facility more efficiently in the meantime, unless you’re going to have a bunch of miserable customers.” Therein lies the need for the data, Van Beek says. “Where can you get data from to try to use your facility more efficiently?” he asks rhetorically, pointing at the companies that manage parking and ground transportation, concessionaires, airlines, ticket counters, gates and the Transportation Security Administration among them. Getting that data can help with maximizing personnel, making real-time adjustments to staffing or merchandise mix or better utilizing gates. “There is more real-time data today,” he says. “Cars are tracked on the curb, the numbers of people through checkpoints and occasionally monitoring of people movements through cellphones, cameras and other real-time monitoring. “This makes facilities, such as roadways, curbs, terminal space and gate hold rooms able to be managed better and allows all of the stakeholders to right-size their workforces or look to technology solutions to replace human resources.” Gaining Traction PHX isn’t the only airport seeking to make data sharing mandatory at some level. Many are in various levels of doing so or planning to. An industry consultant provided AXN with snippets from three documents: • A standard lease provision from Ra leigh-Durham International Airport (RDU) requiring authority-approved computerized point-of-sale system. Oper ator’s must “provide the Authority with real-time access to such system.” • A March 2023 Food Service RFP issued by Albuquerque International Sunport (ABQ) requiring concessionaires to make available transactional data for all sales transactions, on a continuous, real-time

basis, using their point-of-sale system. The city will provide the interface to facilitate the data transaction “to ensure the data is received in a secure and timely manner.” • A lease at Fresno Yosemite International Airport (FAT) that says “City shall have the right to: (a) examine during business hours the total of any POS used on the premises and to inspect such POS for compliance with this section; (b) imple ment an hourly or daily reporting system with which Concessionaire shall comply; and (c) implement a common-use POS, in which event, Concessionaire, must, at its cost, purchase and install the neces sary equipment, train its employees and thereafter use, such equipment to take part in such a system.

Above: The use of technology-generated data can be a huge catalyst toward improving customer experiences at airports, says Oris Dunham, founder of the Dunham Group.

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AX NEWS CUSTOMER SERVICE ISSUE 2023