Dr. Patricia Ryan, Director of Aviation for IOS Partners and an AAAE member and mentor, will be speaking in a webinar designed to educate Young Professionals who are members of the American Association of Airport Executives (AAAE) on July 29th. The subject is “Understanding the Traveler’s Perspective when Designing Airport Customer Experiences”. Dr. Ryan, as Principal Investigator for the IOS Partners project, “Evaluating the Traveler’s Perspective of Improving Airport Customer Experiences”, will share information about the findings of this research project which will ultimately provide the airport community through the Transportation Research Board a Guidebook to use. The Guidebook provides tools for creating personas, journey mapping, benchmarking creation and monitoring, and techniques to assist airports in gaining knowledge about traveler’s preferences.
IOS Partners, with its sub-partners Institute of Cross Cultural Management (ICCM) at Florida Institute of Technology, Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, and Customer Experience Experts (CXE), have prepared a draft Guidebook on “Evaluating the Traveler’s Perspective of Improving Airport Customer Experiences” through the Transportation Research Board’s Airport Cooperative Research Program (ACRP). An intensive research effort was conducted along with identifying additional traveler segments such as families with children, military, students, non-English speaking travelers. Nineteen focus groups (both on-site and virtual) were conducted with participation from all nine traveler segments from all over the United States to ensure that all regions were represented as well as all traveler segments.
Some of the traveler’s perspectives were very enlightening on the need for airports to provide additional services to meet their needs. One of the expected outcomes that require additional emphasis is the need for airports and airlines to cooperate more on the information provided on the apps provided to travelers to ensure that the airport information is correct and fully represented.
Additional training is needed to ensure that all staff / volunteers / subcontractors have the capability to be more empathetic and understanding how to best meet customer needs and improve customer experience.
