Passengers’ experience of airports will be transformed by Covid-19, with increased screening, less time for shopping or eating and enhanced use of technology.
That is the view of industry consultants, Deloitte lead partner for transportation Alistair Pritchard and Deloitte UK aviation and analytics lead Andy Gauld.
Speaking on a Travel Weekly Roadmap to Recovery webcast, Gauld said: “The driver will be limits on personal contact, then how do you integrate health screening and improve standardisation.
“You don’t want to be asked to provide one set of information at one end of your journey and a different set at the other. Making sure the requirements are clear and transparent will be key.”
He noted: “Most leisure travellers spend quite a lot of time around an airport browsing or shopping. But we need to limit the amount of time at the airport in the short term – not have travellers turn up two, three, four hours before a flight.”
Pritchard said: “Less dwell time has wider implications. If people spend less time in shops that has a direct consequence on airport revenues.
“Airports will be looking at their cost base and at what new revenue streams they can create.
He said: “The other impact will be operational. If you end up with less time to process passengers through increased checking, security and health screening, you need to look at the operational processes.
“It might mean you change the profile of staff taking breaks. You could see technology helping to make more real-time decisions.”
Pritchard added: “How do you make agile adjustments to processes and operations? How do you better communicate with passengers if there are delays? Technology can play a part in making airports more efficient and have an impact on operating costs.”
Gauld said: “The obvious example is around the flow of passengers through the airport and how you reconfigure your operation to allow them to make purchases as they go through.
“There are lessons [from] the high street. Can you do pre-ordering, so you pick up duty free as you enter?”
Pritchard noted: “We’ve seen shifts back and forth in the way people travel, the amount of hand luggage people take and whether they check in luggage, and we’ve seen processes adapt – arguably slowly.”
Covid-safety guidance by the European Aviation Safety Agency (EASA) recommends strict limits on the amount of cabin baggage passengers carry.
Pritchard noted: “We had the scenario where laptops couldn’t be taken in the cabin and what that meant getting through security. It’s similar with hand luggage.
“The increased time it takes to get people through security when they have increased hand luggage means you pivot resource to that process. If there is a pivot back towards check-in luggage, you need to move resource back.
“The ability to switch resource to deal with a changing environment is going to be increasingly critical.”
He added: “It doesn’t switch overnight. Typically, a shift occurs over time. But we have seen things shift very quickly when liquids [restrictions] and plastic bags came in.”