Keri Phoenix, director of innovation at Vancouver Airport Authority, and Christina Apatow, CEO of FetchyFox, have presented a joint talk at Passenger Terminal Conference 2024 in Frankfurt.
The presentation, titled ‘A journey toward a personalized AI airport companion’, informed the audience about the features and development of FetchyFox’s solution. This included its user acquisition strategy, a space for passengers to plan their journeys in advance and the solution’s goal to act as the technological intersection of non-aeronautical revenue and accessibility by providing a universally designed customer service app that could act like a personal assistant throughout the airport.
During the talk, Apatow said, “We have been thinking about what the travel experience of the future looks like. It should be personalized and completely frictionless. The question we asked ourselves was, ‘How do we make an integrated global experience multi-airport platform that can personalize that travel experience for every single person? As a company, our answer was to create an AI-powered platform that can be tailored to each individual airport according to your needs. That covers the commercial marketplace, clean relational data, data infrastructure, the right formats and SCP.”
For Vancouver Airport Authority, the primary goal of the project was to provide a “universal source of truth” for its passengers, which could be the solution to which passengers turn instead of an internet search engine like Google. The presenters also covered the experience of working together as a large airport authority and small startup, as well as the internal staff challenges of implementing an AI customer service platform. For example, Phoenix explained that in general, stakeholders were supportive of the idea but it threatened IT and customer service teams, which needed reassurance that this was a tool for them rather than instead of them.
The talk concluded with Vancouver Airport Authority’s plans for the future. Phoenix said, “If we look ahead and where we’re looking to go, having an AI-powered itinerary – so letting someone literally tell them all of the specifics about their journey, what time they should arrive at their destination, etc – is our top priority. Very soon, we will be releasing a generative AI natural language chatbot that can retain conversational information given by the customer and respond like a helpful staff member. We’ll also be rolling out sensor-driven wait times across the platform, which will be informed by IoT solutions across the entire airport. Alongside the customer service platform, we plan to leverage these data results in a number of ways.”
To hear more valuable industry insights from top aviation executives, you can still book an entry pass to Passenger Terminal Conference, which is being held on April 16, 17 & 18, 2024, in Frankfurt, Germany.
