[caption id="attachment_3004" align="alignleft" width="210" caption="Passenger Experience Index"][/caption]

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 …

[caption id="attachment_2944" align="alignleft" width="200" caption="Reaching and engaging with passengers in real time!"][/caption]

Gaining Attention – Reaching Passengers Actively:

The use of metrics in social media can be misleading, as was the use of Internet Marketing metrics before them. A case in point would be the total number of page views – which may sound exciting, but we learned that if the bounce rates were high and leads were not captured and acted upon with a planned process – the page views to conversions or sales were a total disconnect.

In airport social media metrics it’s clearly not solely about the numbers either. If messages are going “unopened” or “unseen”, what difference does it make if how many Facebook Fans or Followers on Twitter there are?

There is another key to metrics that really opens up opportunity tracking, and that is that the medium is multi-channel and multi-dimensional. If your airport’s messaging (any type of value in the message) is relevant and timely to passengers, then the velocity of the message and its reach grows exponentially. This growth happens when messages get commented on, forwarded, Re-Tweeted and most …