[Case Study] Social Crowd-Sourcing for Airports

The Helsinki Airport strives to bring to life the vibrancies of the city by incorporating local culture into the terminal but also brings to life the ideas and requests of its patrons. Our final segment of the Simpli-airports series is on Airport Passenger Crowdsourcing – a concept that was brought to life through the Finnair/Helsinki Airport.

This summer I had the opportunity to visit the city of Helsinki and spend some time enjoying culture, eclectic cuisine, and nightlife.  I also had a bit of time to peruse the airport and look more into the Quality Hunters initiative that the Helsinki Airport and airline partner, Finnair, put into place. My summer visit coincided with the launch of the first idea implemented through the initiative, the Helsinki Airport Book Swap.

Many airports strive to improve the quality of experience for their guests.  Today we are featuring a presentation put together by the Helsinki Airport on their efforts to not only improve the customer experience and service quality for passengers but to do so with the input of many of those same travelers.

The Helsinki Airport and Finnair wowed us from the beginning with this concept, but after the airport submitted the below presentation as an entry for the 2012 SimpliFlying Awards in the category of Best Airport in Social Media, we further began to see even more merit in the concept.  Today we want to share this enlightening case study on social crowdsourcing with our readers.

So what was Quality Hunters 2?

In what some considered to be the most coveted job of the year, 8 innovative, inspiring travelers were given the task of traveling around the world and developing the via Helsinki route between Asia and Europe and finding new ways to improve the overall travel experience along the way.

 

Simpli-Airports Series: Helsinki Airport and Quality Hunters 2

We are excited to share the Helsinki Airport presentation below, in hopes that their example can help other airports to find ways to crowd-source passengers and integrate the ideas of the traveling public into the customer touch-points at the airport.

Let’s face it; sending 8 “guests” off on a quality hunting mission may not be realistic to most airports out there. However, there are quite a few things that can be learned by all airports:

1. Your passengers/guests just may be your most valuable resource when it comes to developing new customer service amenities and touch-points.

2. Developing a channel to house customer suggestions and actually acting on those suggestions may be a way to enhance current relationships and build new ones.

Low Budget Social Crowdsourcing:

  • A Pinterest Board dedicated to customer service ideas – allow passengers to comment on which ideas they like and implement one (financially feasible) top idea each quarter.
  • A social lounge – a place where social advocates of the airport can come and hang out while flying through the airport.  By utilizing a sign up system similar to that of the Social Suite for the US Major League Baseball Team, the Cleveland Indians, airports can encourage advocates to share ideas while waiting for their flights and tweet, blog or post about the experience later.

In the earlier segments of this Simpli-Airports Series, we explored case studies around airports that are using social media to drive specific goals and looked at how they are allocating resources and budgets to these areas:

Do you have an interesting airport case study that you would like us to share with our readers? Write us at: airports@simpliflying.com.

[Featured image: Collage of photos taken by @SimpliElizabeth while traveling through @HelsinkiAirport]

 

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