Friday, June 18, 2010

Untapped revenue source for airports: information services

Nearly every airport has grown to depend upon the income generated from non-aeronautical means. With the sector in recovery mode, this is the perfect timing to revise the current strategies and help the airport business improve its revenue sources.

What about selling airport information? I understand that if an airport does not have such a business model as part of the concession with its airport users (airlines, ground handlers, etc.), it will be difficult to provide such a chargeable service.

However, it might be of great benefit for airlines, for instance, for them to control/monitor the service levels of their ground handlers (e.g. bag delivery times). They might be willing to pay a premium for access to such operational information without having to force them as part of the concession.

In my observation, an integrated Staff Information System (SIS) with flexible and scalable features can be can be sold to airport users at remarkable fees.
Yet, its client deployment must be simple and access must be secure. No specific hardware or software must be required to access. All content must be filtered and easily adapted to users and roles by authorized users. The data must always up to date without the need to refresh them, even be available offline. The communication between server and client must be very lean and secure and not to require a lot of bandwidth.

You would be astonished how much revenue can be generated from selling access to such a SIS, to airport information in fact.

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