Technology has been at the forefront of helping return passenger confidence as the COVID-19 pandemic has continued to rage on over the past, nearly, two-years.
“While terminal maintenance has been top of mind in recent years, COVID-19 really pushed it to the forefront. Typically, most of our deep cleaning is done in the evenings – when passenger traffic is the lightest. Now, we find that travelers want to actually see the cleaning and disinfecting in process. We were able to refocus our scopes of work, and now our janitorial staff are working and visible to passengers throughout the day. This is key to help our airports instill passenger confidence,” said Courtney Wright, Senior Director of Business Development/Aviation and National Accounts for Flagship Aviation Services.
Flagship’s Intuition is a computerized maintenance management system (CMMS) that, has been a boon to facility maintenance operations since the pandemic’s onset, allowing Flagship to use real time data to both effectively manage staff and provide the best passenger experience.
“Intuition is our proprietary mobile CMMS that provides inspections, employee/zone monitoring, customer feedback, and job scheduling, and creates facility reports as well as live dashboards. Intuition can also tie into several Smart Restroom Platforms - we have partnered with TRAX Analytics to provide smart restroom technology (available on an a la carte basis) at many of our client airports.” said Wright.
Flagship’s Intuition CMMS can integrate with any of these services:
- Throughput Counting-thermal beacons are placed at the entrances of restrooms and count the number of people who pass through. Once a threshold is reached a cleaning alert is sent to a nearby janitor to come and service the restroom. The data can be used to track leading and lagging indicators and help to adjust frequencies of cleaning and staff scheduling.
- Stall occupancy indicators-indicate which restrooms are currently in use
- Touchless Customer feedback stickers/QR codes-gives power back to passengers to enter comments/concerns without having to touch a table or device
“Airports can partner with their janitorial team to review the insights that Intuition provides and use them to make data driven decisions about their janitorial services and scheduling. For instance, airports can identify the leading/lagging passenger traffic indicators to help with janitorial staffing or perhaps even establish dedicated restroom attendants during peak traffic windows,” Wright said.
While not all airports have adopted smart restroom technology, Flagship is using Intuition at all of the airports we service and the feedback around the communication and transparency they are able to provide through it has been great.” Wright said.
“All of Flagship’s airports that we currently service have been extremely happy with how Flagship handled the pandemic. Our front-line employees truly are heroes and showed up every day to get the job done and help create passenger satisfaction in a very trying time,” she added.
Wright continued “The future of terminal maintenance is going to be heavily influenced by and focused on technology. Passengers need to be confident that their health and safety is paramount when they are traveling through an airport and flying to their destination. Janitorial and maintenance providers at airports are an integral part of instilling that confidence. We hope that both airports and their passengers realize what an essential part janitorial and maintenance vendors play in creating a great passenger experience.” Wright concluded.
