Improve Your Retail Experience and Airport Operations With These Fresh Eyes

“Airports and their retailers must always be on the pulse when it comes to the consumer market,” said Florian Cruse, chief commercial officer, Bremen Airport in Airport Business. The shifting economics of airport management show that retail and customer experience are vital to airport success and understanding consumers is the keystone for solid retail operations.

But how can you really understand the millions of travelers who walk through your terminals and concourses so quickly? The tried and true methods of the global retail industry are an important start. Long-proven methods of merchandising, marketing and management hold abundant opportunity to improve your retail and overall facilities operations. But those aren’t enough anymore even in traditional retail environments. Those who are innovating by gaining similar insight from their brick-and-mortar stores as they do from their online stores are pulling ahead.

“Digital innovation is a key tool to transform the airport retail experience and improve customer relationship management (CRM),” wrote Ross Falconer in Airport Business. The digital transformation that is changing the world’s economy is also an opportunity for airports – perhaps an obligation, too. Of course, digital innovation is not static and anyone’s knowledge of data collection and analysis needs regular updating.

AI and Lidar – A Better Way To Understand Retail

New artificial intelligence (AI) technology now helps airports improve their retail operations and give your passengers a better travel experience – from security checkpoints, to the concourse, to boarding itself.

With 3D Lidar (Light Detection and Ranging) sensors, airports are transforming into smart spaces which analyze travelers’ journeys through your retail zones and even within the aisles of your retailers. It can gather useful data through third-party technologies that airports already have and combine it with data analytics tools to understand retail customer preferences and behaviors. With these fresh insights, retail managers can improve customer flow, know where to place promotional items, and improve the average sales across the retail floor, while serving their customers better.

Maintaining individual privacy is important to everyone concerned. The technology used in Hitachi 3D Lidar Sensors captures no personally identifiable information (PII). In fact, it analyzes traveler and luggage movements as digital data points. There is never any PII and there is no need to mask and audit video data – it’s excluded from the start! Each traveler stays private and still enjoys a better travel experience.

Not Just for Retail – Airport Operations, Too

“Committed to digital innovation, airports across Europe are introducing breakthrough technologies to create a better travel experience for all passengers,” wrote Marta Dimitrova in Airport Business. In Europe and around the world, travel is growing. The International Air Transport Association (IATA) predicts the volume of air travelers will almost double to 8.2 billion travelers in 2037. As a result, airlines and airports have the unenviable task to find ways to sustain or improve on-time performance, remain competitive for passenger preferences, keep people and assets safe and more.

AI and 3D lidar also have a bigger role in improving operations while providing customers with a more satisfying travel experience. Smart spaces throughout an airport analyze the movement of travelers and luggage, evaluate flight schedules to ensure on-time departures, and so much more to enhance overall operations.

For example, Hitachi Vantara’s Lumada Video Insights gathers data from existing cameras and new 3D lidar sensors to store and manage data on passengers, staff and operations processes. Blending these insights with video analytics and data visualization tools yields useful intelligence that can improve short-term operations and long-term planning.

How Airports Can Use AI and Lidar

Let’s take a look at some other specific examples of how this technology can be used by airports.

• Flight delays caused by overfilled overhead storage compartments can be avoided. Instead of asking crew members to move through aisle against the flow to relocate bags, this new technology prevents the problem before it happens. It can count the number of people in the boarding queue, the number bags and even the size, shape and weight of each piece of luggage by using lidar in the gate area. It can then compare that to the airplane configuration and predict when the storage space will be filled, allowing gate agents to redirect the luggage to the storage bays before it passes through the aircraft doors.

By allowing more flights to leave on time, this digital innovation improves the passenger experience, and reduces emissions linked to idle time and circling. At least 4.5% of aviation fuel consumption is caused by inefficiencies at the terminal.

• The same solution works at the main check-in counter or at security to monitor the size of lines. It will send “long line” alerts, wait time estimates and passenger flow statistics to airport teams so they can better schedule or redeploy agents and keep passengers moving steadily. These improvements give you happy travelers and also happy retailers. According to an article from The Hustle, passengers spend an average of $7 for every hour they are in a terminal. On the other hand, spending decreases 30% for every 10 minutes they spend in a screening line.
• Airlines can also use 3D lidar technology to understand usage and passenger movements within their airport lounges. These insights let the staff maintain high satisfaction scores by helping them stock the right items at the right time, resolve buffet lines and ensure their customers have the experience they prefer.

With travel increasing dramatically, airport managers have a daunting task to improve the experiences of the travelling public. Fortunately, digital solutions can scale with the traffic, offering significant improvements even as volume grows. Solutions like Lumada Video Insights help you be sure your customers spend less time waiting and more time enjoying all of the rich features you’ve added to your departure terminals even as their journeys become smoother and more satisfying.

Justin Bean is the Director of Smart Spaces and Lumada Video Insights Marketing at Hitachi Vantara, which brings IoT solutions to market with the mission of social innovation. Justin has worked with Silicon Valley startups and fortune 500s that are applying IoT and other disruptive technologies to improve our lives and cities. He has worked in the US, Japan and South Africa on projects that include smart cities, smart parking, electric vehicles, renewable energy, machine learning and 3D printing. He was the recipient of the THINK Prize in from renowned innovation and design firm IDEO for their Financial Empowerment Challenge. He also served in Americorps NCCC with a focus on empowering disadvantaged communities, holds an MBA in sustainable management, and resides in San Francisco, California.