Airline Industry Is Making Connections to the IoT

Mar 17, 2016

Travelers are ever more engaged with their smartphones, and airports and airlines are eager to leverage beacons to engage more with them.

Have smartphone, will travel. That is the message that SITA, a provider of communications and IT services to the air travel industry, received from its 2015 Passenger IT Trends Survey, which showed that air passengers are increasingly comfortable with and interested in using their smartphones to book flights, check into flights and manage boarding passes. In a new report called The Future Is Connected, SITA describes the ways in which airlines and airports hope to further engage with their customers through their phones and the Internet of Things.

"For connected travelers, the IoT offers opportunities to link with the air transport industry's IT ecosystem to manage and personalize their journey from their own smart mobile device, on the ground and in the air," says the report, which lists a number of early-stage projects that airlines and airports are deploying in order to enable that vision.

Some airlines and airports offer travelers mobile phone applications that infer their location by leveraging Google's indoor mapping system, which uses cellular communications and Wi-Fi access points to estimate travelers' locations inside the airport. These apps can direct fliers to their gate or baggage-claim areas based on their flight number.

But mobile applications that leverage networks of Bluetooth beacons inside airports and the Bluetooth radio inside a traveler's phone can generate more granular location data.

The SITA report notes that United Airlines customers at New York City metro area's Newark Liberty International Airport hub can use the airline's mobile app for iOS devices to navigate through the terminal.

In France's Nice Côte d'Azur airport, a network of an app determines travelers' locations inside the airport via a network of beacons. The app then sends those travelers special offers and coupons for use at retail shops and restaurants, based on their proximity to those businesses.

A number of airlines are using beacons to better serve frequent fliers. American Airlines, for instance, has added a beacon-based check-in option for passengers entering its Admiral Club lounges. As they approach a lounge, the Admiral Club app receives a ping from a beacon mounted at the entrance, thereby triggering a check-in function on the traveler's phone. By clicking on the notice, a flier is checked in automatically. To confirm that individual's identity, the lounge attendant then receives a notice containing the passenger's name and photo.

More Than Apps
Other beacon applications are designed to improve airport operations while also making the travel experience more pleasant for consumers. For example, beacons deployed by Danish company BlipTrack collect anonymized MAC addresses from travelers' smartphones or tablets in order to estimate how many passengers are waiting in airport queues. Digital signs relay these estimates to travelers inside the airport, whose security and operations staff are assigned to the busiest parts of the airport. (John F. Kennedy International Airport is one of many that have deployed BlipTrack technology, which is described in more detail in this story about Cincinnati/Northern Kentucky International Airport.)

Miami International Airport is leveraging its installed network of more than 500 beacons for a number of use cases, including mobile apps that assist travelers with terminal way-finding, and location-based coupons from businesses inside the terminal. The facility's managers are using temperature sensors integrated into some beacons to adjust temperatures within terminals and, hopefully, to reduce energy usage.

In the report, SITA says that 67 percent of airlines believe the Internet of Things presents clear benefits now, while 86 percent expect the IoT will present clear benefits within the next three years. Yet, far fewer have committed financial resources to take advantage of the technology, with only 37 percent saying they've allocated budgets to develop IoT-based technologies.

The report indicates that only 10 percent of airline smartphone apps currently offer location-based services, but expects that figure to grow to 65 percent by 2018. Apps offered by airports have dug into the IoT more, with 30 percent offering way-finding or navigational services now, and an estimated 91 percent planning to do so by 2018.

Airports and airlines are also looking to extend the functionality of smartphone apps to wearable technology, such as smartwatches. According to the report, 31 percent of airlines and 22 percent of airports are planning to launch trials based on wearable technology by 2018.

And as with IoT technology rollouts in other sectors, the air travel industry is working to establish standards to govern the types of IoT technologies used within airports, and how data transmitted over those networks is to be protected. Toward that end, the Airports Council International (ACI) is developing a framework called Aviation Community Recommended Information Services (ACRIS), which will establish standardized Web-based data exchanges between travel industry stakeholders.

In addition, SITA has developed a common-use registry to serve as a central hub for data to be consumed by apps offered by airlines and airports. It has also created application programming interfaces (APIs) that allow app developers to pull data streams from the registry needed for services, such as airport navigation, real-time flight status, wait-time at security, retail offers and nearby restaurant information.

Matthys Serfontein, SITA's VP of airport solutions, says in the report that in order for location-based services to work within an airport setting, app developers must think about their usability. "If you identify that someone is standing outside a restaurant, you could send them an offer if they come in within the next 10 minutes," he says. But "if you can take into account they only have 10 minutes before they are due to go to the gate, there is no point sending them an offer."

In addition, the ACI and the International Air Transport Association (IATA) are jointly developing a set of best practices for beacons deployed at airports. This document, which should be completed this year, advocates for the use of a centralized airport beacon registry to facilitate their access, usage and maintenance.

 

Source: IOT Journal