Managing passengers’ experience 

through mobile moments 
Article 

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Creative Commons: Attribution­Noncommercial­No Derivative Works 4.0 

Inversini, A. (2017) Managing passengers’ experience through 
mobile moments. Journal of Air Transport Management, 62. 
pp. 78­81. ISSN 0969­6997 doi: 
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jairtraman.2017.03.009 Available at 
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 Managing Passengers’ Experience Through Mobile Moments

Abstract

Travelers’ experience is dramatically affected by the use of digital technologies. On the

one side, travel companies use them to support management and marketing practices
with the purpose of fostering efficiency and ultimately increase competitiveness. On the
other side, travelers heavily rely on their digital devices to organize, personalize and to a
certain extent ‘live’ their travelling experience. Within this scenario, mobile devices are
seen from both ends as crucial mean for location and context based interactive
communication. Mobile devices are here discussed as personalization tool for leisure air
passengers’ experiential journey in an airport starting from customers’ journey analysis,
along with information sources used within the whole journey.

Keywords: customer journey, mobile moment, experience mapping.

Background

Over the years, researchers have tried to define the concept of experience which,
anyway, remains loose given the complexity and multifaceted nature of the notion
(Same & Larimo, 2012). Schmitt (2011) described the customer experience as
multidimensional yet holistic concept, composed by multiple dimensions of how a
human’s mind works. Millard, (2006) defined the experience as an expectation gap
between promised services and the result of what the customer receives. Morgan,
Lugosi, and Ritchie (2010) agree and describe the customer experience as a continuous
process of diminishing the space between promises a company gives to its consumers
and the distributed experience. Academics and practitioners agree that the creation of
exclusive and memorable experiences creates added value for consumers and generates
competitive advantages (Morgan et al., 2010) for the company leading to customers’
satisfaction and loyalty (Cetin & Dincer, 2014).

Within this context mobile technologies are transforming travelers’ experience, by

enabling the co-creation, co-delivery, and co-consumption of personalized activities
(Neuhofer et al., 2013). Recent evolutions indicate that mobile devices are becoming
travel buddies (Tussyadiah, 2013) and their use is profoundly influencing the different
phases of a travelers’ journey (Wang & Fesenmaier, 2013). The contextual and mobile
interactions (Wang et al., 2014) between consumers and the travel and tourism
providers are rapidly germinating into mobile moments (Stickdorn & Schneider, 2009)
where a new purposeful connection is created between travelers and the tourism
organization. Therefore services providers have, for the first time ever, the possibility to
establish meaningful relationships with their customers while the actual experience is
taking place (Tussyadiah, 2015) by using mobile touchpoints as bi-directional point of
interaction (Inversini et al., 2016) with consumers. Google refers to this rising
phenomenon as “micro-moment”: micro-moments occur when people reflexively turn to
a device - increasingly a smartphone - to act on a need to learn something, do something,
discover something, watch something, or buy something (Ramaswamy, 2015).

Customer experience in the aviation sector is regarded as one of the major issues for the
industry (ACI EUROPE, 2014) which, is always investigating customers’ perceptions of
service quality (Fodness & Murray, 2007). New technologies are seen as a key tool to
support and enhance customer experience (Tnooz, 2013) with personal devices such as
mobile phones but also thanks to digital self-services kiosks and mobile check-in.
Furthermore, a CISCO study (Fattah et al., 2009) recognized mobile devices as one of the
biggest opportunity for enhancing customer experience in the airport environment.

This research argues that mobile technology can give a personal added value (being it
hedonic or utilitarian) to passengers only if the customers’ journey (Maechler et al.,
2016) and the possible (mobile) touchpoint are identified and triggered to establish
meaningful relationships between the company and the passengers.

Methodology

This short article presents a preliminary research on mobile touchpoints in airport

passengers’ experience. Moving from the academic concepts of customer experience
(e.g. Millard, 2006) and mobile touchpoints (e.g. Inversini et al., 2016) as well as from
relevant industry-based reports (e.g. ACI EUROPE, 2014) this study was designed to
tackle three primary objectives: (i) to identify experiential activities performed by
airport passengers before, during and after their customers’ experience at the airport
terminal; (ii) to identify information sources used by airport passengers before, during
and after their customers’ experience at the airport terminal; (iii) to generate an initial
understanding of the customers’ journey and possible mobile touchpoints to create
valuable connection between travelers and the airport managers.

The research adopts a qualitative approach based on 170 semi-structured interviews to

air travelers. Interviews were collected in two international locations served by
international airports. To be considered eligible for the research an interviewee should
have taken at least one flight in the year before the interview (interviews took place
March and April 2016) from the international airport of the given location. This
exploratory research only considered leisure travelers as relevant for the sample. After
a series of demographic and profiling questions, interviewees were asked about their
travel experience before coming to the airport, at the airport and after leaving the
airport. Particularly they were asked about the five main activities and the five main
information sources used in these their last trips.

Results were then analyzed with computer-based content analysis thanks to the web-
based service Voyant (voyant-tools.org). Answers were reduced to lemmas in order to
(i) examine lemmas frequency within the answers and (ii) assess key concepts
proximity (Flament, 1981). Results were then plotted into a customers’ journey map. In
order to compile a relevant customer journey map, secondary resources have been used
such as the hallmark report “Guidelines for Passenger Services at European Airports”
(ACI EUROPE, 2014), the CISCO report “Smart Airports: Transforming Passenger
Experience To Thrive in the New Economy” (Fattah et al., 2009) and the preliminary
results of “PassMe – Fast Airport, Stress Free Journey” project funded by the European
Commission (PASSME, 2016).

Results

The majority of respondents were male travelers who travel 1- 5 times per year. Most of
the respondents in our sample travel with a mobile device (54%), and some with laptop
(23%) and tablet (21%). Wearable devices, such as smart watches, are still in their
infancy with only 3% of the interviewees travelling with them.

Travelers were asked the five main activities and the five main information sources used
before coming to the airport, at the airport and after leaving the airport. Figure 1a, 1b
and 1c present the proximity of higher frequency terms with regards to the activities
performed in the three moments.

(Figure 1a - Proximity of higher frequency terms before airport experience)

The sample described the moments before going to the airport (Figure 1a) with
activities mainly related with checking all the issue related the trip (e.g. passport,
luggage) and planning their way to the airport (e.g. private transportation, public
transportation, taxi etc.). Stronger lemmas proximity ties link the core concept of
‘check’ to the words ‘luggage’, ‘documents’, ‘flight’, ‘time’ and ‘pack’ highlighting a series
of organizational activities carried out by air travelers. Most frequent words in the
corpus are: check (n=212); luggage (n=51); documents (n=41); flight (n=34). Main
information sources used in this stage are the airport website (13%, e.g. to reserve a car
park), the carrier website (19%, e.g. to check ticket and luggage allowance) and in
general transportation and navigation website (13%, e.g. how to get to the airport –
transport websites and/or google maps). Activities related to checking the destination
are also popular (e.g. weather checking).

(Figure 1b - Proximity of higher frequency terms during airport experience)

While at the airport (Figure 1b), main activities refer to personal relaxation and passing
time (e.g. shopping, eating, reading) and checking the information provided by the
airport (e.g. gate). Proximity ties link the core concept of ‘check’ to ‘gate’, ‘eating’ and
‘buy’. There is however a strong relevance of the concept of ‘shopping’ which is linked to
‘check’ but also to ‘eating’ and ‘reading’. This suggests that besides organizational
activities, passengers also enjoy their time at the terminal engaging in more hedonic
activities. Most frequent words in the corpus are: check (n=91); shopping (n=68); coffee
(n=42); eating (n=41); eat (n=36). Main information sources are media in the airport
(44% - e.g. screens, totem etc.) and the internet in general (23%). Traditional media do
play a role in this phase (e.g. 7% newspaper and magazines). The airport website almost
completely disappeared (2%), while the carrier website is still visited (5%).

(Figure 1c - Proximity of higher frequency terms after airport experience)

Once boarded and at the destination (Figure 1c), main activities refer to organize the
transportation to the final destination (e.g. transportation, taxi etc.) and/or to the hotel.
Passing time (e.g. smoking) and activities such as eating and drinking are also popular.
Strong proximity ties link the word ‘check’ with ‘transportation’, ‘messages’, ‘eat’ and
‘phone’. There is also the emergence of the lemma ‘hotel’ linked with taxi, and
check/checking. Functional and organizational activities emerge as core occupation of
the travellers in this phase. Most frequent words in the corpus: check (n=65); hotel
(n=57); taxi (n=37); look (n=29); transportation (n=26). Main information sources are
related to transportation and navigation (31%) and passing time browsing the internet
(30%).

Implications

Primary research results were confronted and integrated with (i) the synthetic view of
the passengers end-to-end journey (ACI EUROPE, 2014), (ii) a series of codified atomic
activities passengers do within their airport experience (CISCO - Fattah et al., 2009) and
(iii) an investigation about the stress moments of airport users (PASSME, 2016 -
preliminary results), to generate a customers’ journey map offering a synthetic view of
passengers’ experience at the airport (Figure 2).
 (Figure 2 – Customer Journey Map: Activities and Information Sources)

The synthetic view proposed in figure 2 highlights four main clusters of activities
passengers do before coming to the airport (i.e. at home and on the move): (i) research,
book, pay and organize the trip, (ii) check documents, luggage and flight, (iii) go to
airport (with bus, taxi, train, car), (iv) parking and way finding. Step number three is the
one that generates more stress for the passenger. Before coming to the airport
passengers look to a variety of media. Airport website, carrier websites and social media
are the most used information sources and may offer opportunities for creating mobile
touchpoints between the passengers and the airport.

During their stay at the airport passengers engages with a series of practical activities
related with (i) check in and bag drop, (ii) security check, (iii) relaxing and pass time,
(iv) eat and shop, (v) way finding – landside and airside- and gate information with
different levels of stress (notably security check brings lots of stress to passengers
followed by check-in, bag drop and gate finding). As for what concerns the information
sources, in this moment passengers are completely relying on airport media and the
web. This, as noted by CISCO already in 2009 (Fattah et al., 2009), can offer endless
possibilities of engagement with customers at practical (e.g. way finding) and
commercial (e.g. marketing) way.

Once boarded and at the final destination passengers’ activities refer to (i) security
check and luggage claim (that brings lots of stress) and (ii) eat, shop, relax and pass
time. At this stage there is a prevalence of digital media (social media and website),
transportation media and airport media as information sources.

Conclusions

Passengers go through a series of different activities and moments during their

customer journey and, as shown by the research, they rely on different information
sources (Wang et al., 2014). Smartphones, can play a strategic and tactical role within
the customer journey (Tussyadiah, 2015) by enabling constant connection between
consumers and organization via mobile touchpoints (Inversini et al., 2016) germinating
in customers’ mobile moments. Relevant information should be delivered in the very
moment the customer needs it (i.e. during a given activity), on the device (i.e.
smartphone) and with the form customer needs (i.e. way finding) to create a positive
connection between the passenger and the airport or the organization.

Within the presented customer journey there are two issue that can be further noticed:
(i) the constant presence of social media as information source: a structured approach
towards listing to social media could lead to more personalized interaction with
customers; (ii) the power of airport media while the customer is on land and air side: in
this may support a customization of the airport experience leveraging these media.
Smartphone could enter the picture as a personal devices enhancing the possibility of
experience co-creation (Neuhofer et al., 2013).

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