Passenger Terminal World - Passenger Terminal World Annual Showcase 2025
Traditional facility analyses often struggle to quantify – and therefore optimize – the passenger experience. A new approach to empirical data could provide a more cost-effective answer
2024-10-17 08:58:13
HEART OF THE MATTER
In the world’s more developed aviation markets, the average age of terminal facilities can be measured in decades. While the development of new terminals is certainly a key part of advancing global aviation infrastructure, most improvement needs reside in the hundreds of existing facilities that have been in service for many years. The need for improvement at these facilities lies in the gaps between existing capacities and actual volumes, operation as designed and the current state of the industry, and between passenger needs and what facilities actually provide. These gaps are where experiential optimization can provide a vital bridge.
Limits of the traditional approach
The traditional approaches to defining the scope for existing facilities improvement often include planning analysis, facility assessments and financial projections. As an industry, we have become quite adept at identifying the quantitative needs to improve airport terminals, but methods for defining the qualitative needs have fallen behind. Often, investigations into how to improve an existing terminal exclude a critical aspect that goes to the very heart of the purpose of these facilities: caring for the human travel experience.
Very seldom do we look closely at the human side of this equation. What do passengers and employees think as they move through the airport? What is it like to navigate the terminal with a family, with an elderly parent or with a disability? Does the internal environment increase or decrease one’s anxiety? Does the environment make it difficult to retain staff? Is the space making employees’ jobs harder?
Up to this point, it has been quite a challenge to understand the specifics of the passenger experience in an objective, well-documented fashion. The traditional way of uncovering existing issues with passenger behavior and experience is by verbally gathering the opinions of staff who operate the facility, relying on their observations, anecdotal opinions, personal perspectives and memory. This subjective information may be augmented by limited passenger surveys or site observations.
Advanced information tools
In a world now driven by data, we can be smarter in how we gather hard data. Advances in technology and in the field of design research and behavioral analytics have given us the tools to drastically improve the quality of information gathered around both expectation and experience. These tools and processes enable more informed BELOW Corgan highlights natural lighting in each of its airport designs, including at (clockwise from top left) AUS, LGA and BNA RIGHT Corgan’s passenger journey mapping study at Ontario International asked 17 participants who had never previously visited ONT to participate in eye-tracking simulations decisions, resulting in a better return on investment in time, money and effort.
With these tools, Corgan has developed a new data-driven approach to systematically document the expectations and experiences within an existing terminal, identify the gaps between the ideal and reality, and make recommendations. This pioneering approach – the first of its kind for architecture – enables airport operators to identify a range of potential enhancements that target specific and measurable gaps in experience, across a range of potential levels of investment.
Collection and analysis
Corgan’s experiential optimization service begins with a conversation. This initial conversation explores the existing concerns and perceptions of airport stakeholders as well as the level of investment in improvements that the facility operator envisions in the short and long terms. Corgan then identifies the specific touchpoints in the passenger journey and the staff ’s daily routine across the facility to create a map for the company’s investigative process and begin two levels of inquiry using a range of technologies and data-gathering platforms. These investigations are scalable to facilities of any size or any specific client concern and, depending on the desired outcomes and level of investment, can include detailed on-site data-gathering or be purely secondary research.
Next, Corgan analyzes the data, organizing the findings around each journey segment or touchpoint. The company then begins looking for trends, patterns and gaps between expectation and experience. These gaps can be uncovered not only through comparing expectations and experience but also by comparing these findings with industry standards, best practices and other performance objectives. By organizing the findings of this gap analysis throughout the journey and touchpoint framework, Corgan creates a cohesive story of human experience across the facility.
Once the gap analysis is complete and Corgan understands where the issues are, the company compares the disparities with the airport’s strategic growth and improvement plans to create a series of prioritized enhancement strategies. These strategies for improvement can range from low-cost, low-effort operational adjustments to facility modification projects and future building solutions. With this approach, the suggested strategies can also be tailored to fit within the constraints of the airport’s annual capital development plan and funding.
"What do passengers and employees think as they move through the airport?"
Experiential optimization
Establishing a path forward for improving terminal facilities can be a highly complicated endeavor. Complex masterplanning efforts and new facility design can improve the experience within terminals, but Corgan’s innovative approach to experiential optimization opens more possibilities for incremental improvements outside of a major development project. Experiential optimization is a way to define and prioritize improvements and align them with budgetary and time constraints. It is also a method for making informed decisions based on empirical data and a baseline for measuring the effectiveness of those improvements.
Over the past few decades, Corgan has made much progress in using a range of new technologies to improve its planning, engineering and building processes, resulting in improvements in defining capacity needs, operational requirements and plans for implementation. By applying the same rigorous approach to curating an ever-evolving and improving human experience within global aviation infrastructure, the firm can truly bring joy back to air travel for passengers around the world.
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