How Airports Can Overcome Staff Shortages and Enhance Passenger Boarding Experience
The airport industry has been facing a major challenge in recent years: the lack of staff for various roles is restricting airport growth and thus reducing the potential earnings. With the airlines trying to optimize their costs as well, through several factors, one of them being gate turnover time, this leads to one main problem: how to offer a fast boarding process with the staff limitations.
We have always been concerned with making boarding as efficient as possible.
The staff shortage has been evident in the recent years, but the overall aim of offering efficient boarding experience is not new for us, as we have our solutions in large international airports such as those in Dubai, Houston and Vancouver, airports that need to offer efficient boarding due to high demand for their gates.
Now with the same increasing need from airports of different sizes this is becoming their topic as well. This is why we created Airport CX, to deliver world-class experience to small & medium-sized airports in a cloud-based package.
The easy way – power to the users
One way to make some steps easier is to use special user interfaces that are made for specific use cases to reduce the need for complex manual inputs. The main part of Airport CX are custom UIs for any process – GateUI for boarding, in baggage handling process – BaggageUI for paging & TugmanUI for easy flights assignments to specific belts are done by baggage handlers. Each UI is made to simplify the process for users and make it as smooth as possible.
GateUI simplifies the boarding process with its specific design.
The first step to simplify a boarding process is to offer a collection of ready-made announcements organized in a logical way corresponding with the boarding process. GateUI is designed solely for making the gate agents' work easier and improving the passenger experience by having consistent, professionally made announcements. Depending on the current boarding stage, gate operator can choose the appropriate announcement category, select the desired announcement, and press play. These announcements can be either recorded by professional voice talents or created using our latest text-to-speech (TTS) editor that is part of Airport CX. For our Airport CX clients, the service already has a collection of ready-made announcements that also includes airline specific announcements that reflect special airline requirements and branding, but the announcements can be adjusted to address specific airport’s needs. You can read more on TTS and the process behind it in our article "How Does TTS Excellence Enhance Airport Announcements."
About GateUI: GateUI is a web application that airport staff, such as boarding gate or transfer desk staff, use to play flight-specific announcements at the gate. GateUI lets users see the information for only the gate/location they operate, so they can play announcements for the flights assigned to their gate with customized content and current information. They can also play non-flight related general announcements for cases like unattended luggage. The operator can change the selected zones or languages of the announcements or modify flight display information such as remark or boarding class and the changes will be shown throughout the airport on relevant display signage. The GateUI can be accessed and used from workstation computers, tablets, or special microphone stations from the micnode2 series by nnounce, which have the extra benefit of a touch screen and built-in microphone for live calls.
Automated rules to follow quiet airport policy.
One of the main goals of Airport CX is to support the quiet airport policy, which aims to reduce the noise and stress levels at the airport by minimizing the number of public address announcements. The quiet airport policy benefits both passengers and staff, as it creates a more pleasant and relaxing environment, improves the clarity and effectiveness of the essential announcements, and reduces the fatigue and distraction of the gate operators.
A useful tool that can help maintain the quiet airport policy are Macros which help to implement the quiet airport policy by providing various features and methods that allow the airport main administrators to control and limit the announcements in various ways according to their needs and preferences, such as:
Limit the announcement to only a few languages.
Set a maximum number of repetitions for the same announcement (see picture below)
Some messages can only be broadcasted to small areas, for example a single gate and not the entire concourse.
You can also use more criteria to configure the examples above, such as how much time is left before the estimated departure, where the flight is coming from, status and more.
Restricting Final call announcements that are broadcasted to the whole concourse to only play at most 3 times.
Control and Guide the Announcement Process
Macros are a powerful tool that can be easily customized and modified by any advanced user, offering a similar logic of user interface to automations in your phone or smart home.
Macros can be used for many more purposes, it can manage announcement priority to prioritize important announcements such as final call, limit languages based on origin or destination country. Also, Macros can do more than just restrict users to follow certain policies but also help them, as it can choose announcement zones based on announcement context or automatically generate and play announcements based on trip changes or other certain triggers.
The automated way
For some airports, especially those that have a problem with staff shortage, it is more convenient and efficient to have the system automatically generate and play the announcements based on certain triggers and rules. This way, the gate agents do not need to worry about selecting the right announcement template, language, or zone, and can focus on other tasks and address problems of individual passengers to increase their passenger experience. The automated way allows for a smoother and more consistent passenger experience, as well as reducing the workload and stress of the staff.
To automate the boarding announcement process, Simpleway would use its industry knowledge to assess the current situation, consult the requirements and suggest a tailored solution, as different airports have different needs.
Generally, announcements or groups of announcements can be activated by various factors, such as gate agent action in user interface (making the process more semi-automated).
The full automation at your fingertips
To make the process fully automated the change in flight information from various sources (ODB or the airline) can serve as the announcement trigger. The automation configuration can vary depending on many variables, such as languages of the announcements based on the destination, the priority and frequency of the announcements based on their importance, or airline having its own special branded announcements.
The shown example illustrates a setup that will trigger an American Airlines Priority Boarding announcement when the flight meets the criteria: a departure flight, an American Airlines flight, having a specific gate and boarding status. The announcement will play after meeting the conditions into the selected zones and in the selected languages.
Whether you need a complete Airport system or a solution for your specific situation
Simpleway is the ideal option for any airport that wants to enhance its boarding process and passenger satisfaction. The passenger experience related awards that Simpleway client airports won and the points above show this. We can also automate many other aspects of airport operations, such as baggage handling, security checks, gate changes, or emergency alerts. When connected with Airport CX FIDS module, it can create a perfect fusion of having many systems in one. It can display the announcement text on airport displays and ensure consistent and seamless communication with the passengers.
However, Simpleway understands that not every airport can afford or implement a full-scale system upgrade. That is why we offer flexible and modular solutions that can be tailored to the specific needs and goals of each airport. Whether you need an innovative airport public address system, a sophisticated text-to-speech engine, or just solve well-defined public address use case, Simpleway can help you achieve your objectives and enhance your airport performance by integrating with your current systems and public address hardware.
Thank you for reading this article and we hope you learned something new about Airport CX and how it can benefit your airport.
Join us in creating more technologically advanced airports for all! Explore more at airport.cx and contact us to embark on your journey to aviation excellence.