Introducing the Passenger Experience IndexSM

Airport ROI is a good metric for airports. But in order to extend the opportunity of engaging with passengers as customers, we must focus on them as part of the metric. In so doing, a new measurement paradigm is needed, one which we call a “Passenger Experience Index” (PEI). This Index considers new opportunities of customer engagement that Social Media and new technologies bring to the equation.

The Passenger Experience Index (PEI) must include many new complex objectives and metrics. The passenger focuses on their entire travel experience, whereas current ASQ surveys only deal with airport physical aspects in airports. This should not be confused with the PEI. If we are looking for new opportunities to increase value to passengers while increasing revenue for the airport, then the PEI is the our focus point.

When the PEI is put into an application framework, it becomes what we call “Destination Marketing”. This is a perfect storm of continuous contact, opt in services, geo-location + itinerary, flight data and …

At SimpliFlying Airports/AirGate Solutions, we’ve just completed our most recent update of Airports Using Facebook.  We now are tracking 130 airports, including the Top 30 International Airports, as defined by Airports Council International (ACI). In this update, we focused on airports that use Facebook as a social media platform, as defined by an active Facebook page.

What is truly surprising is that is over 50% of the 130 airports, many of them top international airports, either do not use Facebook as a social media platform or we were unable to locate their site. Equally surprising, is the fact that we also found most airport websites do not provide a link to their social media pages (Facebook or Twitter).

Measured by an airport’s total number of Facebook Fans, we see that 60% of the airports in our Top 10 category are large international airports (in CAPS), as categorized ACI, ranked by total numbers of passengers.
The Top 10 Airports Using Facebook (total Fans)

Cleveland  (CLE)
Akron-Canton  (CAK)
SINGAPORE  (SIN)
Oakland  (OAK)
ATLANTA  (ATL)
Budapest  (BUD)
BOSTON  (BOS)
ISTANBUL  (IST)
DENVER  (DEN)
BANGKOK (BKK)

As with our previous Twitter analysis, we felt there was another to look at the results – as a metric of customer engagement. For this, we use a ratio of fans to …