Empower your Airport Duty Managers

Most often, operational problems are not caused by the airport infrastructure, but lie in the organization. You may find situations where daily operation is focused on airside and on troubleshooting only. Processes are hardly perceived as such and infrastructure and maintenance deficiences are considered to be issues of specialized services. Work is primarily reactive. Airport Duty Managers wait until a problem is reported and then try to resolve it or refer the caller to another department (maintenance & engineering, IT, cleaning, etc.). They do not feel responsible. The obvious reaction of the affected is to call senior airport executives instead to make things happen.

How can we empower our staff, intensify the dialogue with the airport partners and in particular implement a process focus?

1. Assign responsibility for each core process to an Airport Duty Manager which covers infrastructure and quality of that process.
2. Make sure that process weaknesses and infrastructure issues are continuously addressed in a structured manner.
3. Define, implement and monitor service levels with internal and external partners.
4. Discuss and implement contingency plans together with the partners.
5. Establish a dialogue with partners on each management level with a discussion about quality and performance.
6. Make partners aware of the issues and how you address them.

 And we may achieve

• Better cooperation with partners.
• Mutual understanding about each other's business and its issues.
• Partners become more aware of what the airport actually delivers, day by day.
• Airport users percieve the improvements in quality and performance and the image will improve.
• More airlines are attracted.

3 Reasons Why Airport Operators Are Not Customer Oriented

All what passengers want is good service, including less delays and less lost bags. They do not care who owns or runs the airport. Though there is a lot of discussion about passenger experience there are a few reasons why airports are not customer focussed.

Here are the top three:



1. Airport Operators do not know who their customer is. There was this Airport Operator who had an executive meeting to kick-off their Balanced Scorecard process. The goal of the first workshop was to define the Balanced Scorecard. After a day's discussion they had to abort the meeting, because they could not agree on who their customer was. Airline or passenger? Or even retailer, or visitor? They all deliver revenue.

2. Airport Operators lack competition. In another post I was highlighting the fact that for local passengers there is no real competition between airports. Suppose you live and work in Zurich. Would you choose Munich or Geneva as your home airport because you encountered bad service at Zurich Airport? Not really.

3. Airport Operators do not think short-term. Airport Operators are a different species if you look at all the other stakeholders at the airport. Airlines, ground handlers, retailers, they all have to move quickly to consistently win their customers. They face high variable cost while Airport Operators are investment driven with high fix cost. Airport Operators think in master plans and capex and do not look at current customer (who is it?) needs. Not in the short term.

Understanding airport passenger experience - information and communication

After a few bad experiences where the information about a flight delay was very poor I was looking for similar experiences of peers and came across this research for the UK Department of Transport about understanding airport passenger experience. It hits the bull's eye.

It says "Respondents wanted good, accurate and real‐time information flows to help them plan their journey and feel more in control, especially in departures, at boarding gates and in baggage areas. But information at airports – flight information especially ‐ was often perceived to be limited, unreliable and poorly displayed."

Looking at the delay information which is, for insiders, the (Public) Expected Time of Departure, or ETD, I simplified the categories of airports I experienced:

	Unknown or wrong ETD	Know and control ETD
Display delay/ETD	2	1
Do not display delay/ETD	4	3

• Airports in the first category are doing a great job. They work together with their partners, in particular ground handlers, monitor the ETD setting process and keep the passengers up to date about delays. Example would be a delay because the airport knows that the inbound flight is already delayed.
• Airports in the second category do display a delay but they just say "flight delayed" or they show an ETD which is ever changing. This can be really bad when updates only happen after it has become clear to everybody that the flight will be delayed.
  
• Airports of the third category do not publish delay information which sounds strange but it could be because of technical limitations or because they are in fact category two airports or because the airlines do not want them to publish any delays.
  
• Last but not least there are those airports in category four that may stem from the ancient times where airports only felt responsible for infrastructure and neither for operation nor for quality.

In fact, all of the above about delay information applies for any flight information which is displayed to the public. And, when I am talking about publishing reliable and up to date information I also trust that the staff should have the same level of information and attitude.

Attract more transfer passengers

What is the secret to attract more transfer passengers from an airport point of view? The answer depends on whom you ask. Retailers they will tell you how important a great shopping, food&drinks, and entertainment experience is. Architects will insist on great terminals. Operations will tell you that it is about minimum connection time, short walks, and in particular bag processing. The latter being important because frequent travelers have blacklists of airports they avoid if they can.

Why I don't listen to final calls anymore

A 'final call' is a powerful instrument to motivate passengers to go to the gate. Not so long ago I was having a beer with a business partner at a bar at a 20m passengers airport. When we read the 'go to gate' information on the FIDS screen we swung down the beer and moved to the gate. Upon arriving at the gate they announced the final call for our flight. We were glad we had made it in time.

However, looking outside the windows we saw that our aircraft only just arrived. Even with zero turnaround time, the departure would be late. The only options we really were left off was to sit/stand at the gate and wait until boarding started or walk back all the way to the bars where you would not get further information because there had already been the last call.

Would you trust any information displayed at that airport?

Baggage Delivery - A Crucial Element of the Travel Experience

Zurich Airport recently won the award for best airport baggage delivery in the 2010 Skytrax World Airport Awards. Skytrax Chairman, Mr Edward Plaisted said "The prompt delivery of customer's baggage is a crucial element of an enjoyable travel process, and Zurich Airport is clearly providing not only high standards of efficiency in this area, but most importantly doing so on a consistent basis."

I recall when we started to dive into that matter. We observed that airport and airlines cound not verify the service level though Zurich airport received a number of passenger complaints. When we asked the ground handlers, they would claim that their baggage delivery performance was brilliant. In fact, when we started to measure and monitor it, we discovered that out of 120 of 360 flights the bags were delivered too late.

Nowadays, the baggage delivery is monitored and the performance is visible to everybody. Passengers are informed at the carousel about the time when their bags should be delivered. The number of late deliveries went down from 120 to 10-15 per day. For the past two years, Zurich airport has not received any passenger complaint in this area anymore. Well, sometimes they receive complaints that it was delivered earlier than indicated on the information screen at the carousel ...

From a solo to symphony

Even frequent travelers cannot believe that the different organizations at an airport do not work together to provide one common "airport product" as part of their journey. For instance, when they have to wait for their bags at the bag carousel they would blame the lousy airport or maybe their airline. Insiders will tell them that it is a bit more complex and many parties are involved in processing a bag.

Now, should we educate passengers to better understand the complexity of an airport operation? Or, should we make sure that somebody is responsible for the overall quality and efficiency? And, who should that be? There are different models to handle the responsibility for the overall performance of an airport. The one that has not really worked is not to define it at all. Result is, problems are pushed around, there is a blame culture where anybody else is responsible and there are no action plans and unclear responsibilities in irregular situations.

I think that airport operators have a great opportunity to move from a landlord to a more active role driving operational performance. They can make sure that the solo played by individual organizations using their infrastructure becomes a symphony of great passenger experience.