Delivering a passenger services strategy for Portugal’s airports

The Challenge
ANA (Aeropuertos de Portugal) is the state-owned company that operates eight of the key Portuguese Airports and employs around 1300 people. In 2009, 24 million passengers used ANA airports with 13 million in Lisbon alone.

ANA had become specialists in operations and infrastructure and considered the airlines as their customers rather than the passengers, to whom their operations were essentially invisible.

Against the background of the rapidly changing economic conditions, increased competition and rising fuel prices, ANA realised they needed to alter their perspective. To be truly world class they had to begin to cater for passengers and visitors directly and to initiate a shift in focus from infrastructure to service provider.

Considering the various requirements of passengers

ANA approached Engine to help them with this shift in focus, a move that would mean a change to both the business and the culture to one that centres on people as customers, not just the airlines.

The objective was to create a passenger-centred services strategy; together with a suite of value-add services that would help develop a meaningful relationship with passengers and build the ANA brand. In addition, a set of internal practices, new roles and training were delivered to help sustain passenger-centred services in the long term.

The Approach
Creating a design-led passenger-centred services strategy

We aimed to answer the following questions:

What role should an airport play for the people who use it?

What should ANA provide in order to fulfil this role, and how should we provide it?

Which direction should ANA take?

Engine collaborated with a select team from ANA to gather deeper insights into the needs, values and behaviours of passengers, staff, airlines and other service users across a range of travel related experiences.

The team generated a hugely valuable understanding of the experience from both the passenger’s and airports perspective which would allow us to develop key insights around service delivery in this environment.

A passenger services proposition

Through analysis of the observations and by matching passenger needs to what the airport could provide, a vision was established based upon the notion of Preparing you for Travel.

This vision was tested and refined into a passenger service proposition alongside a number of different roles that the airport could perform in order to deliver that proposition.

A stakeholder meeting around the roles of the airport

In parallel, the ideas were developed and framed as concept propositions complete with features and benefits to passengers, the airport and airlines. They were sense-checked for technical feasibility and business viability and also mapped according to where and when they would impact most on the passenger journey.

In-house capabilities and value-add services

The propositions were developed further into a two-part Passenger Services strategy to help shift the focus of ANA from infrastructure to creating, delivering and managing services.

ANA basics are a set of sustainable management tools needed to define, implement and monitor a level of service to passengers and visitors to the airport across all touchpoints. These include guides on how to design and deliver information to passengers in the airport and a guide on working with business partners to deliver a consistent customer service.

Value-add services are a suite of passenger-facing services that include premium services, family-friendly and group services and MyAiport: a platform of technologically underpinned services that enable all services to be accessed and paid for.

The Results
A set of deliverables was created for each of the nine projects, For value-add services these contained final propositions including renders, features, benefits and business factors, service narratives and ideal passenger journeys. The team also developed service specifications, plans and service blueprints for third party agencies supporting the implementation of projects to be rolled out.

For the sustainable management tools, the deliverables contained a structured approach to understanding and addressing the challenge, applicable principles, practical tools and methods, a training and learning strategy including a forum for sharing of insights and know-how.

Taking off
ANA PODs and Family services are being prototyped and piloted across several airports. ANA basics are also being trialled by embedding them within key staff roles and responsibilities and training programmes.

2011 will be a decisive year for ANA in terms of development, implementation and getting projects out there.

A family service prototype