Over the past decade, there have been several paradigm shifts across the world. In 2006, Facebook moved from being a restricted website to becoming open to anyone over the age of 13, George W. Bush was US president, a young senator from Illinois announced his candidature for US presidency, India had only 140 million mobile subscribers and Indian airports were catering to well under 100 million passengers in a year.
Today, Facebook has approximately 1.8 billion users, Donald Trump is on the verge of taking over from Barack Obama, India has approximately one billion mobile subscribers and Indian airports cater to almost 200 million passengers a year. While doing so, airport operators are focusing on the following questions: One, what are the challenges facing airports?; And two, what are the key global and regional trends influencing the future of aviation and airports?
The biggest challenge is balancing growth and investment in capacity with humanising the passenger experience, and use of new technologies and digitisation in ways that improve operational efficiency and resilience.
When we reflect on the most significant developments in the past decade, it seems that many of them were well under way at the turn of the millennium. At the same time, in the past 10 years, some long-wave trends accelerated in notable ways. These included those related to urban growth, demographics, climate change, environment, global security, and technologies for connection. As these trends accelerated, airports and airport operators began to rethink the airport business and ecosystem and focus on the following:
Which of these trends has a particularly high propensity for challenging established norms, that is, the highest possibility of causing disruption?
How will these trends manifest themselves across aviation and airports?
What are the implications of such changes for airports and airport operators?
The two most critical aspects as airports address these questions are passenger experience and use of technology. Airports are doing a lot more than ever to make passenger experience seamless, while adopting new disruptive technologies that seek to challenge every established norm. Such initiatives and research include:
Ways to easily move between different transportation systems to get to airports - can airports and service providers work together to use technology and data to more efficiently integrate transportation modes and systems? In addition, the more unconventional and radical thinkers are exploring ways to replicate the success of Uber and Airbnb. Could airports, in the longer term, become purely a place where different modes of transport intersect - a platform for aggregating airlines by allowing new technologies to bring people together - driverless cars, Uber, high-speed rail and, maybe, far in the future, drones?
Improving the check-in and security process to make it 'one-step' - for years now, airports and airlines have been exploring ways of making check-in and security processes easier by integrating biometrics and RFID. The future is likely to include 'just-in-time' arrival at each of the processes within the terminal based on a pre-assigned system that reduces queuing, single-step check-in and biometric security/immigration scanning system and spending time at the airport doing a range of activities that passengers 'want to' rather than 'have to'.
Baggage technologies and protocols that allow bags to be picked up from home in advance, screened efficiently remotely and delivered just 'in time', with real-time tracking available to passengers
The use of big data to optimise planning and programming both from daily/tactical operational perspective and from long-range perspective to ensure that increased capacity, improved resilience and enhanced passenger experience are all prioritised. The more enlightened operators are also looking closely at manufacturing, logistics and distribution industries for further improvements in capacity utilisation and operational efficiencies
Ability to customise and use the retail, entertainment and dining experience in a way that is more personalised
Working closely with major stakeholders to use infrastructure more efficiently by coordinating schedules, using slots more productively, and sequencing aircraft, both in the air and on the ground, to maximise airspace and airfield capacity. This will, in turn, reduce queuing, the need to 'stack' aircraft in the air as they approach congested airports and allow airplanes more continuous descent.
To succeed, these initiative will require the sharing of vast amounts of data between multiple stakeholders - a challenge that the aviation industry is not completely unused to. However, the next phase will require not just airlines and airports but also regulators, security agencies and governments to come together and collaborate. It is entirely likely that there will be challenges along the way in terms of data ownership, data security and privacy.
What is becoming increasingly evident is that although the current nature of the travel experience is fragmented, the airport of the future will have to work with stakeholders to offer a more 'end-to-end' experience. This can be achieved by working closely with big data and acknowledging the integrated experience - starting with the decision to travel, the mode of travel, to the overall experience from origin to destination, to defining the aviation ecosystem.
There are several virtual and physical aspects that must also be considered. The current travel experience starts online as the Internet is where travel decisions are being increasingly made. This has changed participants' economic behaviour and shifted the value of business data and provision of information from the service provider to the consumer. The information so collected is of great use both from commercial and regulatory/security perspectives.
Change will be driven through the convergence of this virtual aviation business with physical infrastructure. This will produce a 'linked/connected business' that is driven by intelligent data analysis. Technical innovations listed earlier could pave the way for complete re-imagining of the end-to-end air travel experience.
Regardless of the final outcomes over the next few years, the aviation business has changed dramatically from when we first entered it in 2005. We believe that the airport of the future will need to be carefully thought through. ~