How technology is changing the today’s airport /1

Looking on the web for recent technology’s trends influencing the Travel and Tourism industry you can found lot of useful articles and research papers. Taking a further insight at the airport sector, you can go to the SITA website and download for free their 2014 Airport IT trends survey, being SITA “the world's leading specialist in air transport communications and information technology” (source http://www.sita.aero/about-sita) as they said. This survey covers a good numbers of airports (the top 200 airport operators, 106 senior IT executives answering) in all the main world regions representing near half of the global passenger traffic. On it, you can find some well-known words like cloud services, geo-location, Wi-Fi 2.0, Near Field Communication, digital tags, wearables. Then you find a word “Beacon”, which, according to the survey, represents only the 3% of the current major programmes in these airports, but it leads to a really impressive number of initiatives (30%) that the same airports plan to have by 2017 (pilots or trials).

To get started with this buzzword you can read an insight paper on the SITA website, you can go to the Business Insider UK website where you find very recent articles on their growth and a FAQ section as well. You can also read an article on the Umbel blog website citing companies in airports/airlines industry that have trials in place or use Beacon Technology (Virgin Atlantic, London’s Heathrow Airport, Japan Airlines in Tokyo’s Haneda Airport, American Airlines in Dallas Airport) to some extent.

And after reading all of them, firstly you discover that half of the top 100 retailers in the U.S. have already tested beacons during 2014 and that the beacon installed base is expected to grow by triple-digit rates over the next few years (Insider UK’s article). And then, you find that the first airport in the world with a complete deployment of beacons is Miami International Airport, covering entrances, check-in, gate, baggage claim and valet parking zones throughout the Airport.

Beacons can be used in many situations where location and information about the customers can be used together to send relevant information to them, by the means of beacons installed at the main touch points: check-in, passport control, bag drop, departure gates, lounge area, baggage areas, parking areas, retails and stores. These last two seem to be the most revenue related ones (from the airport point of view) and here Beacons can enable a list of possible actions (redeeming targeted coupons, hands-free payment, earning points, picking up duty free items, etc.) that could to enhance the in-store shopping experience.

Now it comes clear why airports want to spend heavily on this technology as they can see a lot of benefits potentially coming from these little devices. Yes, they are little and they need very little energy and little amount of money to be bought !

....little but powerful !!!

Source http://estimote.com                                                   

Yet, they can scan for Bluetooth 4.0 devices (and they can trigger apps) on a much greater distance than NFC (70 meters is the advertised range, with some inaccuracy of +/- 5 meters, (SITA’s Insight Paper), and they can talk with both Android and IOS devices sending little bit of data to the apps installed on them (even if the app is not running – in the Apple scenario).

Summing up, beacons enable airports to connect with travelers, interact with them, collect data about their behavior and preferences, and change the overall traveler airport’s experience.

Is this only shining and positive? yes and ...no, as still there are some questions coming from the nature of airports as shared or common environment, such as: who will be responsible for the deployment of them or who can have access to them, once they have been installed? How to manage multiple beacons at once? And there are other questions about the main competitors in this arena (Samsung and Apple) which prefer to compete instead of collaborating, so ...a retailer who wants to adopt the beacon technology, theoretically, needs two set of beacons installed?

Stay tuned as the answers could come in the next few months.

Leonarda Miglietta and Nadya Levitskaya

Source

http://www.sita.aero/file/11978/Airport-IT-Trends-Survey-2014.pdf

http://www.sita.aero/file/10782/beacons-white-paper.pdf

https://www.umbel.com/blog/mobile/15-companies-using-beacon-technology/

http://www.businessinsider.com/beacons-are-the-most-important-new-retail-tech-2014-7?IR=T

http://skift.com/2014/09/24/miami-international-airport-makes-commitment-to-beacon-technology/