KOUIK Agency (which runs airport benchmarking) has created a mobile app (IOS and Android) called Airport Advisor.

The app is available in 14 languages.

For whom : for airports owners

Why : as  said in the last press release of IAR :” Almost a fifth of people would travel further to fly from a specific airport in order to get better service…”

How do we bring an answer to this?

With our mobile app Airport Advisor :
Passengers have the opportunity to mark, quote and discuss about 17 airports’ services in our app. They can post pictures, discuss in through the forum.

This create a valuable and specific Big Data for airports.

No need to be anymore on many social medias to find out about airport’s E-reputation.

The app works as a funnel.

To get these feedbacks, airports have to become member of our programm. We give a first pack of three services of their choice, on the 17 available. And each additive service is in supplement.
We deliver you CSV exports sorted by services (weekly, monthly…) as you wish.

By analysing these feedbacks airports will learn from their customers what they do like or want to see improved and even will ask for new services.

contact us at : contact@kouikagency.com  for more details

Our teaser 1/5 here :

visit the store IOS and Android and download the app to find out more about it.

Did you know airports are just as worried about competing for your business as everyone else? Next time you walk through an airport terminal, think about all the systems and processes swirling around you, or could potentially swirl around you, intended to improve your experience there. If you were the CIO or IT director of the facility, what would be the focus of your efforts?

The airport customer experience happens at two levels – either delivered by the airline or by the airport itself. With evolving technology based upon artificial intelligence and data from the Internet of Things, airports are poised to dramatically increase their delivery of more satisfying customer experiences. At least, let’s hope.

I had the opportunity to sit down and with Mark Gamble, senior director of product marketing for analytics at OpenText at the vendor’s confab earlier this year, to discuss the possibilities. Gamble, who has been focused on employing technology to make customer experiences more engaging, is working with a large Asian airport, helping it to leverage cognitive analytics to deliver a more satisfying experience to transiting passengers.

“The concept what they want to solve is very simple,” Gamble explains. “We’ve all suffered the inefficiencies in airports – the escalator is broken, so you have to lug your bag to the top. Then you get to the restroom, and it’s messy. All these things contribute to lower customer satisfaction.”

In this case, the airport he worked with — like most others across the world — suffered from inefficiencies associated with the usual maladies — security line backups, foot-traffic bottlenecks, malfunctioning escalators and messy or overflowing washrooms. Believe it or not, things like this ultimately cost airports millions of dollars every year in lost passenger revenue. That’s because if an airport gains a reputation as providing substandard experiences, passengers — and eventually the airlines that serve them — begin to try to avoid it.

“What if we built a cognitive system that knew that a plane was coming in early, and knew the connections people needed to make, and knew to put those connection gates as close as possible, and knew to dispatch the gate crews, bathroom maintenance crews, to make sure that the flow of traffic was never blocked?” Gamble asks.

The Asian airport addressed the problem by employing cognitive analytics — part of OpenText’s Magellan platform — to analyze data captured from around the facility and make real-time or near real-time decisions to alleviate or even prevent issues. The system analyzes foot-traffic data captured from hallway/doorway sensors and security cameras, and combines it with weather data and real-time flight arrival data from the control tower, to help manage gates better by automatically opening those closest to connecting gates, dispatching gate crews, and alerting facilities staff when and which washrooms to clean. All decisions are acted upon instantly and without human intervention.

The key to achieving this, Gamble says, “is by listening to, and intelligently reacting to data.” The solution weaves together data streaming through algorithms built on the machine-learning capabilities of Apache Spark.

This holiday season — and the rest of the year for that matter — many of us will be trudging through congested airports, incurring the stress of long lines, missed connections and rushed meals. It’s reassuring to know that IT and data specialists are working to make this a more positive experience.

Source : https://tinyurl.com/ycdf6fzo

The event brought together more than 400 delegates from airlines, airports and technology providers to discuss how to unlock the value of big data in order to improve safety, security and profitability within aviation.

“Big data is transforming our industry,” said Charles de Gheldere, director, travel intelligence, IATA. “New aircrafts are basically data centers, generating terabytes of data; passengers are connected with their watches, with their phones and other devices — there are sensors everywhere. Artificial intelligence is here, machine learning is here.

“Data-driven organizations will take this industry to the next level. The sky is the limit.”

Representatives from airlines, airports and even data-driven companies outside of the aviation industry were on hand to discuss topics broken into four educational tracks – technology, safety and operations, passenger distribution and sales and airfreight data.

IATA announced it would hold another ADS in 2018. The second annual event will take place June 27-28 in Berlin.

source : https://tinyurl.com/y8o4ls99

The air transport industry is highly-connected and there is a need for ‘single source of truth’ for various data used by different stakeholders. Control of shared data is a key concern for all.

LONDON – SITA Lab, the research team of the air transport industry’s IT provider SITA, revealed the learnings from research it carried out with British Airways, Heathrow, Geneva Airport and Miami International Airport into ‘smart contracts’ residing on a blockchain.

Blockchain has been heralded as a transformational technology for many industries. While several use cases have been identified for the air transport industry, the opportunity of using ‘smart contracts’ for shared control of data by airlines and airports is one which promises real benefits. SITA Lab today issued FlightChain, a paper outlining the findings of its research conducted with its airline and airport partners.

The air transport industry is highly-connected and there is a need for ‘single source of truth’ for various data used by different stakeholders. Control of shared data is a key concern for all. Blockchain offers potential to share data in a controlled way. SITA recognizes, however, that there is a need for research so the industry can take the right approach, to ensure governance, standards, compliance, security and more.

This research project was initially established by SITA Lab with Heathrow Airport Holdings Limited (HAL) and International Airlines Group (IAG) with Geneva Airport and Miami International Airport participating. Called FlightChain, it was devised to investigate a single source of truth for flight data.  The “flight data problem” is a well-known issue in the industry – namely, there is no single source of the truth and the data that does exist, is not easily accessed by all parties.

While there are many cases of airlines and airports collaborating to share flight data, this data still resides in separate silos. When there are flight delays, this results in differences between passenger apps, airport FIDS, airline agents. FlightChain ensures all stakeholders have the same information.

Jim Peters, CTO, SITA, said: “Our FlightChain project has demonstrated that blockchain is a viable technology to provide a single source of truth for data for airlines and airports, specifically for real-time flight information. While there are other technologies available for sharing data, the use of blockchain, and smart contracts in particular, provides ‘shared control’ and improves the trustworthiness of the data. This research with our partners shows the potential of blockchain for sharing data across the air transport industry.”

FlightChain was established as a private permissioned blockchain (implemented on both Ethereum and Hyperledger-Fabric) that stores flight information on the blockchain, using a smart contract to arbitrate potentially conflicting data. British Airways, Geneva Airport, Heathrow and Miami International Airport provide flight data that is merged and stored on the blockchain. During this project more than two million flight changes were processed by the smart contract and stored on FlightChain.

Stuart Harwood, Heathrow Automation and Innovation, HAL, said: “Heathrow’s participation in FlightChain with SITA Lab has been very valuable. We are still early in the blockchain technology cycle and more research is required but FlightChain has shown the opportunities for shared control of data with our industry partners.”

Peters, added: “In a real-world network, it will be important to manage the changes to the smart contract as it affects all participants. Industry bodies such as ACI and IATA, working with SITA as the neutral IT provider to the air transport community, could be involved in the establishment of the contract. In fact, we can imagine a future where industry standards are written directly as smart contracts instead of published as PDF documents.”

Glenn Morgan, Head of Digital Business Transformation at International Airlines Group (IAG), said: “Now we’ve proven the technology, we are really excited by the opportunities that blockchain can create in the industry. We will work with IATA and ACI to ensure the best practices are in place.”

The research paper published today details key lessons learned regarding governance, smart contracts, system security and system performance, scalability and reliability. Along with a view on the use of public versus private blockchain networks for the air transport industry.

source : https://tinyurl.com/y9wdannp

The big data generation is upon the commercial aviation industry.

According to a 2016 Oliver Wyman MRO Survey, the global fleet of commercial aircraft could generate a massive 98 million terabytes of data per year by 2026. Between the big aviation players – the OEMs, the airlines and the maintenance, repair & overhaul (MRO) operators – there is a ton of interest not just in gathering data, but sharing it for a number of different benefits, such as predictive maintenance or health monitoring systems.

Data sharing

Some of the leading players in the industry are starting to work on their own data platforms to get in on the benefits of sharing engineering data. GE’s cloud-based Predix platform allows third party MRO operators to download predictive analytical data via the internet, store it within their own systems and share it with customers.

Airbus launched its own cloud-based data platform, Skywise, in June which collects data such as work orders, spares consumption and flight schedules from multiple sources across the industry for MRO operators to perform predictive and preventative maintenance. So far, early adopters include easyJet, Air Asia, Emirates and Delta Airlines, all of which are using the platform for predictive maintenance.

Like Airbus, many airlines and MROs will have several different customers, partners, locations and, in most cases, use different programmes for each one, which leads to data being siloed and sharing programmes being more internally focused.

Speaking at a recent MRO Europe panel, David Longridge, VP services sales for Boeing, said data collaboration between organisations is a key priority in today’s aviation landscape.

“Collaborating with data will bring more mutual benefits for airlines and MROs, but how to do this effectively between the parties is the real challenge,” said David. “No airline wants 50 different applications to look at its aircraft – ideally they’d like to use one or two.”

Collaboration at work – China Airlines

IFS customer China Airlines is one of the largest airline operators in Asia and, much like Emirates in the Middle East, provide MRO services for many of the airlines they codeshare with.

Aviation safety is a top priority for the airline and it considers the quality assurance of maintenance work as the best foundation for this. Since setting up the Engineering Maintenance Optimisation (EMO) unit in 1959, the company has become a key player in the MRO sector. Currently, China Airlines helps support over 40 domestic and international airlines with over 2,300 maintenance engineers working in five different hangars across Asia, North America and Europe.

The airline’s EMO department found its legacy IT systems were hampering its safety efforts, unable to keep up with changing maintenance and safety requirements happening in the industry.

Houng Wang, responsible for engineering activities at China Airlines, said “Our network of legacy mainframe systems often could not deliver the data insights we felt were critical if we wanted to evolve the business and intro­duce new efficiencies. For the most part, these systems were siloed from each other, and operated by their own set of processes for capturing and storing data. This made it very difficult to access and share timely mainte­nance information across the organisation.”

China Airlines chose to implement IFS Maintenix to help optimise data sharing across the airline and its subsidiaries. Real-time management of line and heavy maintenance events as well as data capture at the point of maintenance was a significant benefit to growth areas of the business – especially in expanding third-party MRO services for the airline’s customers, such as Continental Airlines, FedEx, Korean Air and Japan Airlines.

In addition to reducing operating costs by $3.5 million, IFS Maintenix helped China Airlines significantly decrease its aircraft layover due to more efficient scheduled and unscheduled line maintenance, meaning aircraft spend more time in the air and less time in the hangar.

A clearer picture

The benefits of data sharing are plain to see. Better visibility into what’s happening at both the company and industry-wide level puts organisations in full control of maintenance, giving them a clearer picture of what’s happening around them to help collaboration with other industry players and benefiting from mutual efficiencies.

The gains aren’t just for airlines but for passengers too, as better vision into data will help increase aircraft availability, increase safety and provide a chance to shift cost savings onto passengers.

source : https://tinyurl.com/y8eac4l2

Kian Gould and Peter Mohn discuss how can airports create an integrated online and e-commerce customer experience.

The #airport #industry is one of the data richest industries, especially when airports and airlines collaborate and connect their data and loyalty programs. With e-commerce and #data #automation, airports have the great chance to create personalized offers for each customer. Having this passenger footprints is a major advantage compared to big players like Amazon and Alibaba. Airports have another big advantage: for airports, the two main e-commerce cost drivers in e-commerce, traffic acquisition and product returns, can be neglected. For airports, online traffic comes for free, and returns and return shipping costs can be almost zero, as passengers get their delivery at the airport. Having those two cost drivers at almost zero, #digitalization and e-commerce is a big opportunity for airports and #travel #retail.