Why we wait for bags to arrive at the carousel

I received an e-mail from a colleague who recently experienced Zurich Airport. He said that the baggage was amazingly fast on the carousel and wished we could do something at his home airport.

My response was that there were a number of hurdles which were hard to overcome first:

1. Lack of competition: This is the biggest hurdle. Airports are usually monopolists for local passengers. If you need to wait a few more minutes at the baggage carousel, how would that influence your decision on choosing your destination airport?

2. Lack of awareness: How big is the problem? If the airport the asks the ground handlers about the bag delivery performance, guess what answer you will get? It must be truly excellent. What all partners are not aware of, that they are in the same boat, because the passenger will rate the overall quality. Maybe immigration could help with longer queues before we get into the arrival hall ...

3. Lack of accountability: As an airport you can always respond to a complaint that you are terribly sorry and claim that it is not your responsibility but the ground handler's or airline's. In fact, I have seen such letters. Well, some airports start to include service levels into their ground handler license. But, wait, isn't the airline (in fact the passenger) paying for that service?

4. Lack of transparency: The ground handler will not share their performance provided that the bag delivery times are even measured. Now, how can we motivate the ground handler to capture the first bag / last bag information and share it with you?

5. Lack of cooperation: Standards can only be defined and reviewed together. If they are not being met, then there can be a fact based discussion, where the airport is only interested in the output (result) and not the input.

There is light at the end of the tunnel because more and more airport operators become aware that passenger experience is important, in particular for arriving passengers. Even though some of them have no choice, this is part of the first experiences when you arrive at a city, region or country.

How to resolve this, how to overcome the hurdles? Well, true CDM (airside, terminal and landside), incorporated into the organisations, processes, systems and governance is a great enabler to achieve this. Why not ask the airport who was awarded with the best airport baggage delivery award in 2010?

Cost of delays in Europe 2010

Eurocontrol is publishing delay statistics of airports participating in the ECAC (European Civil Aviation Conference). In their recent report they provide an overview of the delay situation in 2010. This report was used by a number of news agencies (in German only, apologies) to list the worst airports in 2010.

I used the report to assess the total delay cost of ECAC in 2010. According to the information I retrieved from the report, adding a few assumptions on the average size of aircraft and seat load factor, I came up with impressive figures about departure delay cost:

In 2010 there were more than 7 billion Euros opportunity cost to passengers, more than 2 billion Euros operating cost to airlines and more than 400 million Euros operating cost to airports.

And I did not even include the cost of cancellations which were estimated at more than 100,000 flights at the April peak of the volcanic ashes crisis.

Change happens in nanoseconds

This morning I was sitting in the train from Zurich to Frankfurt listening to Tom Peters’ audiobook "The Pursuit of Wow". After a while he talked about change and that change would only take nanoseconds, but to maintain it would take years.

It took me also a while (fortunately the trip from Zurich to Frankfurt by train is long), but then I thought he was right. A decision to change happens immediately. After that, it is developing the correct habits and putting them into play.