Although they are an essential and pervasive element of the customer experience, airports are institutional and bureaucratic at best, and struggle to address the customer experience in a meaningful way.
Customer Experience of Waiting: Chairs
Let's consider airport waiting areas as an example.
The seating is designed to be easy to clean and durable. Some of it, like the IMAT chairs in the picture, is quite attractive.
When you watch it in use, here's what you see:
- People banging their heads into the person sitting behind them, because back and front are just too close
- People trying to catch a snooze on a long layover in the middle of the night, but finding nowhere they can stretch out, even though the terminal is almost empty
- People strategically placing parcels on seats in order to ensure an empty seat and some minimum space between themselves and the next party over because we just don't like to sit that close to strangers
- People trying to balance a hot drink and a sticky bun on a slanted seat while they make a phone call, resulting in lots of spills and messes
- People (like me) dragging one of these behemoths closer to the plugs so I don't have to sit on the floor
The cleaning staff tend to place seating for maximum efficiency with minimum work, not to improve the experience of waiting. At Pearson, this means great huge areas with no seating at all. (Maybe they need a plan-o-gram?)
JP Morgan Chase Targets Business People Seeking Plugs
J.P.Morgan Chase feels our pain: they have started placing stickers around the electrical outlets in airports. Indianapolis was first, as reported in Wall Street Journal (subscription required) and brought to my attention by Quirk's. The stickers read, "This outlet works. Now you can too." Also on the sticker, the e-mail address and local phone number for their commercial banking unit. This is brilliant, IMHO.
Getting Your Exercise in an Airport
In the larger airports, figuring out which carousel has your bags can be a major challenge. What, you mean you can't read the single monitor located at the far end of the hall? But exercise is good for you, right? No wonder so many people refuse to checks their bags now.
This might sound just grumpy, but why are the taxi stands in newer airports (like Pearson) always so far from the baggage exit??? You definitely don't find that in small airports (like Kingston, JA or Edmonton, Alberta), where the taxis circle like sharks around chum, and are happy to carry your bags to their car.
[I'd love to work on this for someone, but I don't think airports actually compete for business in the usual sense, so it's pretty unlikely they would hire a customer experience consultant.]
Pricing to Captive Markets, Reprise
A few days ago I spoke about timing and price changes in the context of air travel. When I left Kingston, I took one look at a line-up that seemed to have about 300 people waiting for about two clerks, and said, "I think I'll upgrade". On the whole, I'd rather see people fix their service problems with actual good service. But if you can't quite get your total customer experience there, you might want to consider letting people pay for a premium service of some kind.
Blue Mountain Coffee, Reprise
More on the coffee: just in case I wasn't clear, Blue Mountain coffee is delightful. But there aren't many coffee bars, and they mostly don't invite you in to sample the local product. Just my observations about marketing in other places. I have no idea what the situation is in the resorts. Anyone?
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