Queue Management and How It Improves Airport Operations

Airports are notorious for their queues and in order to avoid the extended wait times, people often leave their home hours in advance of their flights. Many others have stopped flying through specific airports just because of the never-ending congestion. Recently, however, some airports have started employing queue management technology to reduce wait times, optimize passenger experience, and increase their revenues.

In a sector as competitive as the travel industry, you do not want to be left behind when tools like these are being utilized. Here are ways that queue management solutions can be used to improve airport efficiency:

1. Monitor passenger traffic

There are few businesses busier than airports, and they cater to a large number of passengers at every hour of the day. People counting and queue management technology can help airport personnel figure out exactly how many people pass through their halls per day, how many people are on queues around the airport, and the average time that every passenger spends on the queue.

This information will be useful in implementing measures to manage crowds more efficiently. The airport could employ more staff, open up new lines, or improve service delivery to ensure that people are moved out of queues more efficiently. Real-time passenger tracking can also be used to identify areas that are congested, and steps can be taken to resolve the issues that are causing the hold-ups.

2. Determine peak periods and seasons

Airport managers can easily figure out which hours will be their peak periods of the day by checking their logs for when larger flights are arriving and departing. They can also assume, to a certain degree of accuracy, that the summer and holiday periods will be busier than the winter months. However, these analytical methods are rudimentary and they won’t tell you exactly how much more passengers to expect. They can’t tell you just how much more staff you need to deploy or what patterns appear consistently from season to season.

Intelligent queue management tools will provide you with historical records and help you anticipate the number of passengers to expect during peak periods and seasons. These figures can be used to deploy staff and manage queues better. Additionally, these tools can tell you to a 98% accuracy which periods are your slowest and which are your busiest.

3. Measure and optimize employee performance

To ensure that the passengers that pass through your airport have an enjoyable experience, you want to reduce the time they spend at check-ins and security booths to the barest minimum. With queue analysis tools, airports can find out how much time customers spend in front of an employee and which employee responds the slowest.

The ideal solution would be to come up with a benchmark, the number of minutes it should take on average to respond to a passenger. This can be used to train airport employees on how to keep things short and effective.

4. Increase shopping times

Many passengers look forward to visiting the duty-free shops whenever they are at the airport. However, when the queues are too long, they are left with too little time and they miss out on the buying experience. By reducing the time passengers spend in queues, airport mangers can increase their shopping time, thereby maximizing every passenger’s airport experience. Additionally, the more time that passengers spend at various airport kiosks, the more the revenue for airport retailers, and the better for the airport.

As a matter of fact, airport retailers may also take advantage of queue management technology to reduce customer wait times at their stalls.

5. Maximize airport real estate

With real-time customer tracking, airports can note the paths that passengers spend the most time on and the shops they love to visit. This information will be used to set rent prices for the shops and monetize passenger footfalls. When trying to attract new retail partners, you may show them the statistics of how many visitors pass through the airport; these are all potential customers.

Furthermore, if there are areas in the airport that passengers linger that have no shops, you can also present the traffic data to prospective retailers and rent the space out to them at an even higher rate, further increasing airport revenue.

This is one of those instances where a piece of technology has a maximum upside and no downside. As an airport manager, queue management tools not only help you reduce queues and congestion, they also help you optimize your operations. In addition to guaranteeing all visitors a good experience at your airport, you also have the chance increase revenues. Maximum upside!

To leverage this technology, please contact V-Count, the world’s leading provider of people counting and queue management technology. Our queue management tools track and record your data. The data is transferred securely to the cloud, and cloud-based AI and ML tools are used for in-depth analysis. This enables us to provide our customers with actionable information that can be worked into their operations and future strategies.

To begin your free trial, please visit the V-Count website.