Veovo today announced the launch of its Live Passenger Forecasting capabilities to prevent airport crowding, improve capacity planning and boost operational efficiency. These capabilities will help build passenger confidence in the safety of air travel and accelerate the return to normal passenger levels. Keflavík Airport (KEF) is the first to adopt the solution, helping to reduce the impact of recent travel volatility and support new distancing initiatives.
As flights begin to resume globally, the ability for airports to cope with air travel fluctuations and new processes will be imperative to minimise crowding and ensure smooth journeys, while operating under significant budgetary constraints.
Veovo’s Passenger Forecasting has been designed to reduce uncertainty around planning, enabling airports to handle unforeseen events.
The solution draws data from any available sources, including various sensor technologies, airline schedules and booking files, the Airport Operational Database (AODB), queue wait times and lane productivity, event calendar and boarding pass scans. This creates an accurate by-flight forecast of how passengers will arrive and transit through the terminal. The airport can then build a robust resourcing plan to match demand.
“During this COVID-19 period, new air traffic patterns and changing passenger behaviour means that we can no longer depend on plans based only on historical show-up patterns. Veovo’s new live re-forecasting capabilities provide us with an early heads-up on changes to passenger presentation profiles. This allows us to easily adapt plans and rosters to reflect the current situation, improving journeys and keeping costs down,” said Thordis Bjornsdottir, Specialist in operation research at Isavia.
The solution continually re-forecasts, based on live data, and alerts the operator immediately when predetermined thresholds are reached. Resourcing and operational actions are recommended to minimise bottlenecks and prevent crowding, such as by adjusting call-to-gate time, changing border control lane openings or reallocating baggage belts. It also allows the airport to understand the cause of the deviation from the plan, which could be anything from a late arrival, to a slower than predicted security process. This insight is then fed back into the future plan to continually improve the forecast accuracy, based on local conditions.
With a configurable, visual dashboard, airport partners, such as security, border control agencies and retailers, are also kept informed, as to when passengers will show up, and any impact on operational areas.
Available as part of the Veovo Airport Intelligent Platform, Passenger Forecasting can be easily customised to accommodate an airport’ s access to data and planning needs and does not require any specialised skills to use.
Veovo CEO James Williamson said: “Thanks to our continued partnership with Keflavík Airport, we have been able to quickly launch these new enhancements to our Intelligent Airport Platform. We’re delighted they’ve been able to realise the benefits of real-time passenger forecasts since re-opening their borders to most travellers last month.”
Keflavik Airport, operated by Iceland’s airport authority Isavia, uses Veovo’s Intelligent Airport Platform for smart connected decisions across airside and landside operations. Capabilities include queue and passenger flow management and capacity optimisation, flight and resource management, and revenue management.