Airport Evolution
Airport operations and business models have evolved dramatically over the last two decades to support the explosive growth of the global airline industry. Regulatory reform and deregulation ushered in a new aviation era in North America, as well as in Europe, Asia, and emerging countries, and produced dramatic traffic growth, diversity, and choice for airline passengers. As airlines refined their operating models to align growth to efficiency, airports evolved in parallel to create massive networks of hubs and feeder systems, which together created an efficient air transportation ecosystem.
Airports today are typically classified as global or regional hubs, and as origin and destination (O&D) airports. Hubs and O&D airports have very different operating profiles that influence strategies, business models, and ecosystem partners, including tenants, airlines, and businesses in the surrounding “catchment” area.
Over the past two to three decades, airports have gained more stakeholders, with increasingly complex operations. In so doing, they have honed their capabilities to focus on effectiveness rather than mere efficiency. Let’s take a closer look at how airports have evolved.
Airport 1.0: Basic Airport Operations
In the Airport 1.0 phase, airports focus on capabilities necessary for safe and efficient management of landings, departures, and other aircraft operations. They offer basic passenger services, including check-in, boarding, security, baggage pick-up, and moderate retail, food, and beverage services. Typically, these airports operate in a landlord model, where the airport/landlord provides the real estate, while airlines, concessionaires, and other tenants design and implement their own business environments.
Airports exhibit highly evolved operational efficiencies but pay insufficient attention to passenger experience. Operations, systems, and business units are likely to be highly siloed, making it difficult for different entities to collaborate across business boundaries. While there is always an airport-wide master strategic plan, the airport business units and tenants procure and implement technologies in a stovepipe fashion, with little ability for information sharing and centralized management without costly and often suboptimal systems integration.
Airport 2.0: Agile Airports
Airport 2.0 features “agile airports” that adapt well to a changing environment and fast-paced operational tempo. Technology-enabled collaboration is highly evolved throughout these airports and is implemented across business units and functional silos. Business entities and ecosystem partners share information quickly and seamlessly, enabling agile airports to respond rapidly to environmental and operational changes. By employing a centralized and shared services strategy, agile airports often preclude tenant deployment of single-use and proprietary technologies. Instead, an airport-wide, converged network architecture offers shared services on a common services platform. Tenants take advantage of services such as managed communications, IP telephony, broadband, Wi-Fi, and video surveillance at competitive market prices, without the need to deploy and maintain their own technology solutions. From a business value perspective, the agile airport offers advanced operational efficiencies, enabling faster turnaround times for airlines, faster set-up times for tenants, and improved passenger experience.
Airport 3.0: Smart Airports
Airport 3.0 comprises “smart airports” that fully exploit the power of emerging and maturing technologies, with advanced and pervasively deployed sense-analyzerespond capabilities. Systems are built around a “digital grid”: a single, converged, often carrier-class IP network that enables high-speed broadband traffic throughout the entire ecosystem, including the airport, airport city, airlines, seaport, logistics, authorities, and other parties. The digital grid is the airport’s nervous system, touching and managing every point of interaction (see Figure 1).
By enabling the exchange of real-time information, deep cross-silo collaboration, and airport-wide process integration, smart airports significantly improve operational efficiencies, passenger services, and advanced security capabilities. They also take passenger experience to new heights by delivering a range of personalized services enabled by seamless exchange of passenger data to anticipate needed services. Broad process integration among airlines, retailers, fuel providers, caterers, and other ecosystem partners creates new benefits along the entire value chain.
Cr: Smart Airports: Transforming Passenger Experience To Thrive in the New Economy [Dr. Amir Fattah Howard Lock William Buller and Shaun Kirby]
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