New technologies bring a host of new impacts into the airport environment that airport operators must consider. While all impacts are important, and may vary in significance depending on the situation, the following two impact areas play important roles in virtually all airports. This set of featured impacts focuses on passenger experience and airport design.

Impact: Passenger Experience

While there is variability between airports, passengers can spend long periods of time within an airport before leaving for their flight, and in that time, they interact with the airport in myriad ways. Passengers’ experience with the airport—good or bad—can heavily shape their perception of air travel and how they interact with the airport in the future. When thinking of passenger experience, the focus is generally on queuing and security checkpoints, but the passenger experience begins before a passenger even arrives on-site at the airport.

Airports must consider how a new technology will alter aspects of the passenger journey and what that may mean for areas like operations, security, and revenue. The passenger experience must be continually reviewed to confirm that technology is driving efficiency and safety.

Impact: Airport Design

New technologies can drastically alter the airport design landscape as they begin to require new functionality to support them or alter the way people interact with different areas. Airports are heavily designed around passenger processing and the supporting technology. Technologies that impact passenger processing can begin to impact building design meant to use previous processes. This design change is very evident in airport check-in halls today. With the increasing use of mobile phones, passengers are arriving in the airport more prepared and, in some cases, skipping the check-in hall altogether. Transformative technologies may bring with them unforeseen or poorly understood changes to airport design that airport operators must accommodate.