Early in an economics course, students learn about complements and substitutes. Tea and coffee are substitutes since most people would not drink both at once. Tea and biscuits are complements though, best enjoyed together.

It is the same in business too, with some products and services achieving more value to projects when they are used together than the sum of their parts might suggest. This article is about a relevant use case in the world of travel.

Right now as you read thousands of people are starting their summer holidays. They are passing through airports, travelling on ferries, riding on trains or using motorway services. Along the way they will have questions.

As far as travellers are concerned, any member of staff represents their service provider. If they want to know where a platform is, whether bags will make it or when a retail outlet will open, “I don’t know” will not cut the mustard.

Travel operators are engaging with the data revolution to help deliver better services to customers instantly and at any time. Heathrow Airport has built a community app which allows any member of staff to access full information about their services instantly.

As well as standard data regarding flight status and gate location, Heathrow’s community app also receives updates and insights from staff across all parts of the airport. If something changes, live updates are available on the app. This means that a traveller can approach any member of Heathrow staff, ask any question and expect an answer that is helpful, correct and complete.

Meanwhile managers can track activity on the app to understand how different parts of their airport are performing in real time and react accordingly. Heathrow’s community app does not just help serve customers directly, it makes operational management easier too.

Staff community apps like Heathrow’s help deliver great customer service every day. But they miss half of the picture. While they record and analyse the staff experience, they do not include comments from passengers.

At Surveyapp we have developed kiosk- and smartphone-based surveys that collect passenger feedback in real-time. We think that they are the perfect complement to staff community apps like Heathrow’s for three reasons. Read on to find out more…

Passenger priorities

Travellers have different perspectives to staff in three ways. First, they are focused on their one journey while staff in the airport or station, or on a plane, train or ferry, need to serve all the travellers. An issue which is critical for one traveller, like whether or not their bag might make a tight connection on a delayed flight, can have little to no impact for most other people.

Over a large number of journeys, one issue repeated on every flight or voyage might not be registered by staff as significant. A passenger feedback app will aggregate data though and help operators understand the extent to which seemingly ‘micro-level’ incidents like these are actually significant at the ‘macro-level’.

Second, staff tend to be much more familiar with the facilities and services which they offer as even frequent travellers might use a certain airport, station or transport company only once. Community apps collect data and insights with the staff’s familiarity in mind. If travellers face difficulty at times and in places where staff are not normally to hand, community apps might never pick up an issue. Passenger feedback apps will though.

A third way in which traveller and staff perspectives can vary is that for travellers time is of the essence. Their journey continues while staff stay in place. The extent to which travellers are hassled or stressed by procedures that appear smooth to staff might not register on a community app but would with passenger feedback.

Travel service operators using both community apps like Heathrow’s and passenger feedback apps like Surveyapp will be able to combine the data they generate to provide deeper insights than either one would provide on their own. Together they are perfect complements.

Spatial disparities

Not all parts of a port, vehicle or vessel are used in the same way by both passengers and staff. Staff working in airport security for instance might never use their own channels if a dedicated channel for them is set up behind the scenes. In a regular channel, airline crew and airport staff often go straight to the front of the line.

It might be hard for staff using their own facilities that work well for them might not be so good for travellers. A good example is when a ten-person flight crew all go to the front of a fast track security line, something that your correspondent has seen at many airports.

Of course flight crew need priority because their airline’s operation depends on it. But the point of fast track is that it is fast. Ten people going in front of a short queue is irritating for high fare flyers. If the crew split evenly between all the available channels that would be better. Passengers would be more likely to flag the issue than staff.

Another example is during aircraft boarding. Staff do not necessarily know what exactly is on a specific plane. Insisting that passengers put special ‘under the seat’ tags on their bags when the passenger knows they are in the front or exit row can lead to confusion and stress that would be picked up by a passenger experience app but not by a staff community app..

Insights for other travel operators

One of the big opportunities in travel is for each business in a chain to help partners understand what travellers value and what they need. Sophisticated operators might even be able to monetise this type of data.

Data generated by staff experiences are helpful for partners, but may be harder to turn into a revenue stream than data generated by passengers. In the short term these insights can improve services. In the long term it is plausible that more data sharing will facilitate more business too, as airlines and ferry companies deploy their capacity to ports where they know most about what passengers want.

oliver AT surveyapp DOT io

savio AT surveyapp DOT io

Photo by Anete Lūsiņa on Unsplash