Currently experiencing strong passenger growth, Keflavik Airport in Iceland – a major European hub for low-fare aviation – is expanding its use of Veovo technology to help ensure smooth passenger flow.
The primary hub for recently merged Icelandair and WOW Air, Keflavik has recorded five-fold growth in the last nine years. Veovo technology, which consists of sensors and advanced deep learning algorithms, will provide a cohesive picture of how passengers move through and use the airport, enabling more informed operational and business decisions.
“We use the data to see when levels of service are breached and to find out the reasons. This has helped us to identify the problems we had with our work shifts starting too late. Before implementation, we did not have this information at hand to actually quantify the problem. Now we are able to make more informed decisions and anticipate problems before they arise.” explained Guðmundur Karl Gautason, Project Manager — Operation Research at Keflavík Airport.
The technology was originally implemented at check-in and security processes in 2016, to provide wait time and occupancy figures to help meet service level agreements and alleviate overcrowding. It was complemented by Veovo’s Airport Management System, to keep passengers informed of wait times and flight information via screens and mobile apps.
The extended roll out of Veovo’s technology will enable Keflavik to establish a more detailed view of passengers’ movement patterns, from their arrival at the airport to boarding the plane. The airport will be able to extract any combination of data, both real-time and historical, for all areas, broken down per flight.
Not only will this in-depth information enhance the understanding of how disruptions or alterations affect standard behaviours, it will also allow the airport to improve operations in areas of interest. This could include the positioning of signage, improving the layout of existing facilities and optimising operational resource allocation.
Acknowledging how the expanded technology will enable Keflavik to provide a better customer experience and a more efficient journey through the airport, Guðmundur Karl Gautason stated: “As the most reliable, and one of the only solutions on the market capable of measuring passenger flow through multiple stages of the journey, it will provide us with continuous, airport-wide visibility 24 hours a day, seven days a week. It will not only enable us to more efficiently plan resources but also allow us to see the impact of the various actions we implement.”
Keflavik joins several other airports, including Amsterdam, Auckland, Bristol and Billund, that are using the end-to-end flow management solution to guide physical expansion plans and streamline operations.
