5 Ways to Upgrade the Passenger Experience
Travelers search for amazing, delightful experiences. Their high expectations of the experience of exploring new places translate into increasingly high standards for the travel industry. Luckily, technology is helping travel businesses better meet those expectations.
Whether an airport, rail, or bus service, technology is helping transform experiences to be more intelligent and fulfilling for passengers. Empowered by innovations in the industry, travel-related companies can invest in new initiatives to improve passenger experience and even reduce their own business costs while doing so.
Here are five ways technology can help upgrade passenger experiences:
Gain a Single View of Customer Data
Today, travel businesses have various means of collecting customer data: online, via apps, or in some cases via ticket machines on buses or in station concourses. That data is shared between an increasingly wide range of ecosystem partners. Until recently, the process to bring all the data together from various sources has been time-consuming and expensive.
Scattered data can make it hard to know who the customer is, their preferences and circumstances around their travel. This means planning marketing campaigns or designing new products is like a shot in the dark.
TIBCO® Data Virtualization can bring your data back into the light. Orchestrating access to multiple and varied data sources, it provides a single view of customer data. Data virtualization is an essential foundational piece for making better decisions around passenger experiences. It can make a big difference when it comes to agility and cost.
With a more complete view, you can intervene at the right time with a great offer or new product.
Dynamic Pricing for Parking Lots
Parking lots are a key source of revenue for airports. According to the Airports Council International (ACI), parking revenue brings about 20 percent of total operating revenue for airport hubs of all sizes.
Of course, like a seat on a plane (or a train, or a bus) each space represents perishable inventory. An hour in which it’s left empty is an opportunity to earn that disappears as time passes.
By pricing parking spaces in real-time, based on availability and forecasted demand, you can increase yield. Using advanced analytics with TIBCO, you can achieve this competitive advantage with data science and streaming analytics.
Furthermore, with the right technology providing a clear view of your customers and facilities you can take advantage of opportunities that may arise. For example, you might decide to give away a free upgrade to a mother traveling with young children, arriving late for her flight due to traffic.
In this way, parking can not only become a source of additional revenue, but also a way to provide an exceptional passenger experience.
Service with a Smile
Amazing passenger experience is, of course, largely in the hands of frontline workers who interact with the customer at check-in or throughout their travel experience. So when those employees are happy, so are your customers.
Travel companies often rely on their employees to go above and beyond to ensure positive experiences for customers. But to guarantee these types of behaviors, employees must enjoy their work and feel encouraged to find opportunities to make a difference.
TIBCO Connected Intelligence helps deliver a better working life for employees, reducing staff churn and increasing job satisfaction.
For example, one airline created an app, using TIBCO Connected Intelligence, for aircrew which enables them to swap shifts. This app allows employees to work alongside friends and plan work around their private lives. By improving employees’ experience, you can indirectly improve the passenger experience as well.
Optimizing Gate Allocation
The allocation of gates to flights is a critical challenge airports face day-to-day.
And yet in many airports, it can be a largely manual process.
A delayed flight can be reallocated from gate to gate a number of times before it lands, which means that ground staff must replan each time who and how tasks will be carried out.
By integrating an accurate view of incoming flights with an up-to-date awareness of which gates are operational and available, you can keep disruption to a minimum. That way people with the right skills and equipment are ready to attend when needed.
Understanding Where Everything Is and Whether It’s Working
A delay at the gate is an annoyance, but sometimes it’s the lesser of alternative evils. No one wants to board a plane on a hot day if the air conditioning has failed.
But what if the generator that you now need to power the cooling on your plane isn’t working? How do you find a working replacement, so you can get you passengers seated comfortably and in the air more quickly?
With an operational awareness platform that keeps track of where equipment is around the facility and whether it’s working, you can quickly find fixes to common operational problems that cause delays and discomfort.
How TIBCO addresses all of the above
More than other industries, travel has the chance to use data to be enormously helpful and develop close relationships with customers. When you provide an exceptional, very personalized service, you can increase revenue, attract and retain new customers.
TIBCO is helping organizations like yours make the most of their data. We can start small, and scale up to run the largest, most sophisticated technology environments in the world. Our technologies bring data from systems of any type and size into a single view. They turn fast-moving data into information and enable your people and systems to take the next best action so your entire
Find out more about how TIBCO creates effective customer experience solutions for its customers across all industries.
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