Innovation soars at this year’s Aviation Festival!

Innovation soars at this year’s Aviation Festival!

This week, the ParkCloud team journeyed to London to attend the 14^th annual Aviation Festival – a hub for professionals from the airline and travel technology sectors to debate, network and exchange thoughts on developments and challenges facing the industry.

 

As well as a great opportunity to talk to fellow peers and companies about the great work ParkCloud has been doing globally in the airport parking market, the festival also allowed us to gain a wider appreciation of the innovations happening currently at the forefront of the aviation sector.  

 

With over 100 exhibitors, 200, speakers, 50 seminars and 120 global airlines in attendance, London’s Business Design Centre was a buzz with ideas and opinions regarding crucial factors that will influence consumer behaviour and boost airline revenue over the next 12 months and beyond.

 

Across the keynote speaker sessions and seminar presentations, key themes centred largely on personalisation; utilising data to enhance passenger interaction and tapping into consumer behaviour across airport touch points to create a seamless customer experience.   

 

Airlines were encouraging, and in turn encouraged by suppliers, to interpret data better in order to maximise aviation and non-aviation (ancillary) revenue streams. With communication channels evolving all the time, this included assessing the Amazon business model for use by airlines and integrating new technology to turn social messaging platforms into sales channels – highlighting the importance of being where your customers are.

 

Travel technology – an area always brimming with innovation and creativity – was particularly engaging this year. As a travel technology company ourselves, it was encouraging to see the diverse range of ideas presented and explored. Naturally, companies from this sector were keen to demonstrate how technology can add simplicity to the customer journey – not make it more complex. Many presentations centred on enhancing the customer journey via apps or technology that allows real-time recognition for passengers, whereas others explored exploiting app technology to tackle passenger wellbeing with psychological in-flight fear managers – intriguing stuff!

 

Other interesting themes investigated new ways of enhancing brand loyalty, driving sustainability through distribution and ancillary sales and the rise of long-haul, low cost airlines.

 

Overall, a very insightful event and a great opportunity to network with current clients and new contacts!

 

If you’re an airline interested in offering reserved parking options for your customers, please contact us for more information.