With a five-fold growth in just nine years and 10 million passengers predicted this year, Iceland’s Keflavík International Airport is one of Europe’s fastest-growing tourist and transit destinations. The airport wants to ensure smooth passenger flow as volumes increase. To ease the challenges, Isavia — Iceland´s national airport and air navigation service provider — announced plans to expand the Veovo Passenger Predictability solution throughout the airport compound.
The technology, which consists of sensors and advanced deep learning algorithms, will provide a cohesive picture of how passengers move through and use the airport, enabling more informed operational and business decisions.
Initially implemented at check-in and security processes in 2016, the solution provides wait time and occupancy figures to help meet service level agreements and alleviate overcrowding. In parallel, the airport also deployed Veovo’s Airport Management System for operational visibility to enhance resource management. Together, the solutions ensure wait times and flight information are communicated on screens and mobile app, keeping passengers informed.
“We use the data to see when levels of service are breached and to find out the reasons. This has helped us to identify the problems we had with our work shifts starting too late. Before implementation, we did not have this information at hand to actually be able to quantify the problem. Now we are able to make more informed decisions, and anticipate problems before they arise,” said Guðmundur Karl Gautason, Project Manager — Operation Research at Keflavík Airport.
With the extended roll-out, Keflavík will have a detailed view of passengers´ movement patterns, from the moment they arrive until boarding the plane. The airport will be able to extract any combination of data, both real-time and historical, for all areas, broken down per flight.
This in-depth information will enhance the understanding of how disruptions or changes affect standard behaviour, allowing the airport to improve operations in areas of interest. This could include optimising operational resource allocation, including bus usage or gate allocation, and improving the layout of existing facilities, including positioning of signage and for guiding physical expansion plans. The airport´s retailers will also be able to fine-tune their service with improved staffing, tailor product placement and variety, as well as benchmark performance for continual improvement.
“Veovo is a trusted partner to Isavia, and we are excited to extend the use of their innovative solutions to provide better customer experience and a more efficient journey through the airport. As the most reliable, and one of the only solutions on the market capable of measuring passenger flow through multiple stages of the journey, it will provide us with continuous, airport-wide visibility 24 hours a day, seven days a week. It will not only enable us to more efficiently plan resources but also allow us to see the impact of the various actions we implement,” concludes Guðmundur Karl Gautason.
“We are thrilled that Keflavík Airport has decided to expand our solution to understand the passenger journey from start to finish. We are confident that it will present them with a unique opportunity to better manage and support resources by focusing on high-demand locations and periods, make strategic decisions, to better utilise facilities, and ensure that passengers enjoy a smooth travel experience,” says Claus Hein, Sales Manager at Veovo.
Keflavik joins a host of other airports, including Amsterdam, Auckland, Bristol and Billund, that are using the end-to-end flow management solution to help guide physical expansion plans, and for streamlining operations to accommodate rapid passenger growth.
