Common Use principles — where airlines and airports share passenger service spaces, services, technology and equipment — are a core element of the modern digitalised passenger journey, and deploying them to the cloud enables airports and airlines to take advantage of a range of new technologies, from kiosks to mobile apps to remote checkin sites.
Craig Dunstan, Christchurch Airport’s manager of terminal customer experience, tells us that considerations when selecting a technology partner include “a strong strategic alignment, the technology options available, a strong customer experience focus shared by the two organisations, and the future opportunity to expand beyond our footprint towards remote check-in at locations such as Lyttelton Harbour for our cruise partners and airport customers.”
This flexibility is key as airports seek to improve operational efficiency. The more of the standard journey tasks that passengers can undertake online or independently on arrival at the airport, the fewer resources airlines and ground handlers have to devote to this everyday, bread-and-butter processing.
Christchurch Airport is now using Amadeus’ Cloud Use Service, and Dunstan reports that this kind of cloud infrastructure provides “the desired flexibility to adapt and implement changes to the passenger journey, whether locally driven or by the industry, including support for physical onsite devices such as kiosks.”
As the changeover progressed, Dunstan notes, “the cloud architecture certainly made the deployment far easier and quicker than had we attempted the traditional model. That applies beyond our company — it was far easier and more cost effective for our airline partners, because they didn’t have to deploy dedicated connectivity onsite — it was all centralised within the Amadeus data centres. Beyond that, the advantage was the normal cloud benefits of resilient design, performance and flexibility.”
Indeed, says Carl Rogers, Amadeus’ strategy & business development manager for airport & airline operations, “what is often not obvious about moving services to the cloud is that it benefits not only the airport, but also the airlines and the passengers.”
Specifically, he tells us, “for airlines, the cloud hosting of their services means that there are reduced operational costs for the airlines on the network connectivity side and reduced complexity. Amadeus takes care of the deployment of the airline applications to all Amadeus airports — including ZQN [Queenstown, NZ] and WLG [Wellington, NZ]. For passengers, the cloud capabilities mean that the airlines and the airport can more easily adapt services to enable better customer service such as off-airport check-in capability, potentially check-in in the courtyard or carpark during big events or disruptions.”
This cloud flexibility also enables additional airline users and expansion — and even extension — of processes to meet seasonal peaks, a must for tourism-heavy Christchurch, with its strong northern hemisphere winter/southern hemisphere summer leisure demand.
“One of the key elements of the cloud solution,” Rogers says, “is that it will continue to scale. Amadeus will continue to deploy additional airlines onto the service for operations — either for year-round services, or ad hoc and seasonal services — at Christchurch without the need to upgrade local servers or infrastructure. Amadeus will also continue to work with each of the airlines to deploy new versions of their applications as they continue to evolve their digital capabilities and further improve the passenger experience.”
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