Beyond cost and availability of destinations, the customer experience at the airport is an increasingly important factor for passengers when booking travel, according to SITA’s 2023 Passenger IT Insights report.
The study reveals that customers are looking to technology to optimise every aspect of the post-pandemic travel landscape, from addressing pain points in the airport journey, to supporting air transport sustainability, to streamlining intermodal travel.
“Experience at the airport has become fundamental to passengers’ decision making, and travellers are telling the industry loud and clear,” said David Lavorel, SITA CEO. “The more passengers are subjected to clunky and inefficient processes, the more likely they are to consider other options. Passengers are pointing to a clear way forward for the industry: now more than ever they recognise smart technologies as key to streamlining travel while reducing its environmental impacts, both for air travel alone and for the broader intermodal ecosystem.”
With travel demand skyrocketing and linger staff and resource shortages continuing to impact airport and airline operations, the resulting disruptions to air travel have taken their toll on the overall passenger experience. Flight delays and cancellations are frequently cited as causing anxiety at the booking stage as well as during travel.
Against this backdrop, passengers are embracing the use of smart technologies to smooth pain points along the journey. This year has seen passengers continuing to adopt their mobiles as a remote control for the journey, with boosted usage across booking, check-in, dwell time, on board and bag collection.
SITA’s report also confirmed that passengers are increasingly more comfortable with biometric identification throughout the journey. Passengers scored an average of 7.36 out of 10, which was up from 7.26 in 2022. There is additional interest in completing certain checks per-arrival at the airport to further maximise efficiency, with nearly one fifth of passengers pointing to ‘automated checks before the airport ensuring documents are sufficient to pass border checks’ as a potential improvement to the booking process.
Sustainability is another key area of interest when it comes to innovations in technology with the use of new technologies supporting sustainability the number one initiative passengers would value most for airports (62%) and airlines (64%). This has jumped considerably from about half of passengers in 2022. These technologies include flight path optimisation tools and software that monitors data on environmental performance to reduce airport emissions.
Openness to intermodal travel is also growing with the majority of passengers expecting to book intermodal trips in the coming year. Meanwhile, one third of passengers expressed interest in being able to drop their bags at their journey start point and have them arrive at their destination.
