Passenger Terminal World - Passenger Terminal World Annual Showcase 2025
EDITOR’S COMMENT
Elizabeth Baker 2024-10-17 07:15:07
When I first signed up for baseball, I wasn’t there for the sport’s ‘chess on a field’ reputation. I wanted to swing the bat, make the amazing catch, score the final home run – and all the other exciting things I’d heard about. However, after just a few weeks of swinging, catching and scoring, I found that there was a lot more going on under the surface. It was a game of strategy and communication, from base coaches signaling when to steal bases, to hand signals calling pitches and outfielders coordinating on fly balls. That’s why it quickly became one of my favorite sports.
In much the same way, airports are a mental game. For example, it might not occur to passengers passing through Zayed International Airport’s column-free, 50m-high departures hall (detailed in our cover story, Bigger & better, on page 10) just how hard even the largest airport operators must work to keep up with the rapidly evolving technological landscape. To the untrained eye, an airport is just a gateway to another exciting destination. Nevertheless, AeroCloud’s Getting On The Runway To Growth report found that 60% of airports recognized that not investing in technologies posed a significant risk to operations in 2024.
From curb to gate, passenger terminals are brim-full of subtle technologies designed to service, guide and entertain thousands of travelers in a strategic and secure manner. Real-time smart luggage tracking, self-service check-in desks, 3D CT x-ray scanners, contactless retail payment systems, biometric boarding gates, AI-enabled passenger flow tracking – they all work together to make that passenger journey as smooth as possible.
That’s what fascinates me about the aviation industry – this intense focus on the human experience and how best to leverage cutting-edge solutions to nurture it into something efficient and enjoyable. Running the PassengerTerminalToday.com news desk for the past three years has shown me that airports are constantly scrutinizing their facilities to create the best passenger experience possible – one that can please customers, stakeholders and bottom lines alike.
In Sky’s the limit on page 18, which features the winners of the 2024 Skytrax World Airport Awards, Victor Sánchez Messier, service and experience director at El Dorado International, explains how the airport rigorously mapped the entire traveler journey. As a result of this in-depth analysis, it has revamped its wayfinding system, even going as far as renaming piers and boarding gates. In return for its efforts, El Dorado was awarded Best Airport in South America.
“Communication across the field will clearly always be a key facilitator”
What’s more, these technologies and processes are only getting more advanced. Take the digital travel credential (DTC). Ten years ago, if someone had said you could pass through an airport without handing over your passport, would you have believed them? What about two international airports in one journey?
Following the release of its official digital travel credential specifications, ICAO has now created its own DTC to help passengers do exactly that. As the organization’s Public Key Directory (PKD) program manager, Ciaran Carolan, explains in Let’s connect on page 32, DTC pilots are underway in all corners of the world to create seamless cross-border processing. If successful, these trials will mean that travelers can store the same data that is on an e-passport in a digitally signed credential, which can have its virtual component stored on a cell phone.
However, such progress can be tripped up by differing rates of implementation and a lack of coordination. In Handle with care on page 26, Monika Mejstrikova, director of ground operations at IATA, tackles this issue in the context of baggage mishandling rates. She explains, “One of the biggest vulnerabilities in baggage handling, and a significant cause of delays, is interline baggage transfers. Airlines need to ensure that they have the infrastructure to efficiently exchange this information with each other.” According to Mejstrikova, speaking the same language pays off. IATA estimates that if just 10% of baggage messaging shifted from Type B to extensible markup language (XML), the industry could save US$70m annually.
With so many moving parts integral to the airport environment, communication across the field will clearly always be a key facilitator. The next step seems, therefore, to be to return to what makes the industry unique: its inherently global relationships. In this spirit of collaboration, I’d like to extend a massive thank-you to all of the talented contributors – industry experts, writers, subeditors, designers, photographers, conference directors, production managers, sales representatives, data teams and more – around the world who made this issue possible.
Elizabeth Baker, editor
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