We hear that Gatwick is planning to significantly enhance the passenger experience when it opens its new South Terminal.
New technology is coming including automated barcode scanners replacing boarding-pass checkers. We understand that the new security lounge will use state of the art crowd-measuring technology to identify the shortest queue. According to the Time to Wander blog, the airport said “we’re going to use colour-coded lighting. A queue with a waiting time of a minute or less will be one colour, and we’ll use others for two, three and four minutes. And we’re getting rid of the queueing system we inherited from BAA. You’ll come into the hall, join the shortest queue, and if it slows down, you can go and join another. We’re trying to do things differently.”
There are plans to have 19 colour-coded lanes in place when the new South Terminal fully opens in August, one of which will be reserved for families and those requiring special assistance.
Great to see airports starting to compete to offer a better experience than others.
These sound like some interesting ideas to help passengers. The colour-coded lighting might be a really good way to help people understand the dynamics of the various queues that face them - we will wait to see if it works. It could see a better distribution of people and a positive sense of choice for the passenger. It'll be really interesting to see if firstly passengers understand the coding and then how responsive the system is to the dynamic changes in queue.
We certainly applaud the shift to allowing passengers some sense of freedom rather than current stressful more controlling approach. Being able to change lanes seems interesting but will you see a chaotic movement of people when their lane changes colour! We shall see...Labels: airport terminal, passenger experience, security, wayfinding
