Laura and Max chat with Cody Shulman, Managing Director at Xovis, about how people-flow technology plays a role in the passenger experience at various locations in the airport where queuing and crowding typically occur.
The Hold Room, Episode 21 – Cody Shulman
Transcript
[Introduction]
TJ: Welcome to The Hold Room with ACC: a quick update on all things relating to airport development as well as the Airport Consultants Council.
Wendy: This episode is part of a New Passenger Experience series hosted by ACC’s Terminal and Facilities Committee. In this series, we are collecting the experiences and perspectives of different types of users of the airport passenger terminal, including: business travelers; leisure travelers; airport executives; airport, airline, TSA, and concessions staff; and airport consultant staff, to name a few. For more information on this series and the hosts, go back and give the first episode a listen to
Paula: In this episode of the Hold Room, Laura and Max chat with Cody Shulman from Xovis about how people-flow technology plays a role in the passenger experience at various locations in the airport where queuing and crowding typically occur.
[Interview]
Max: Welcome back to the Hold Room. Today, we're very excited to have Cody Schulman here with Xovis. Cody, could you please introduce yourself and tell us a bit about what you do?
Cody: Sure. Thank you Max. Cody Shulman. I'm the Managing Director for Xovis here in North America. So this is a hardware and software company. Together we make our own sensors and systems to really tackle people-flow and movement and throughput and analysis of anywhere in the airport where there's a crowd or a line or anything of the sort. I manage the U.S. business on that sense for both airports and our non-airports business as well.
Max: Thank you. So the first question that we typically ask our guests is how has the pandemic affected you, either in your job or your travel experience? Or alternatively, because you may not necessarily be interfacing directly with the airport environment, how have you seen the pandemic affecting the types of environments that you're usually working in?
Cody: I think it's had a number of interesting changes. I mean some of them we all know about, whether it's, you know, traffic downturns, you know drastic changes in airline route networks and things like this. In terms of how it's affected my job or me, you know everyone kind of hit the pause button initially and then we kind of took stock of things. Actually a number of projects we had kind of accelerated whether that was because an area that we were working on an installation or configuration of either, you know, temporarily closed or a decrease in passenger or throughput allowed the flow of people to be redirected and you could work on some kind of installation, maybe even during this day, which of course is easier and cheaper and things like that. We really had airports come back to us and say: OK, you know, I have a Xovis system in my terminal complex. I have eyes and ears, but you know how can I adjust them? How can I use them differently?
Now with the situation we're in and the kind of first early steps that we took were to that now buzz word that is part of our vernacular: social distancing, right? So we created a thing to serve our customers or users with what we call PDI physical distancing indicator. And so that was a comparative metric that we had to kind of come up with and and go at kind of right away to make sure that they were getting some useful thing to say Here is you know a situation here today, let's redesign it, reconfigure it, compare it to see how people are moving about differently. Another thing we did was analyze face masks. So we taught our system to detect whether or not a passenger was wearing a face mask. And that allowed them to look at compliance and see if they were adhering to certain things and make adjustments, whether it was from changing their announcements, signage, additional guidance on website, things like that, it was very interesting to see that pulled out.
Another aspect I think of the travel experience that changed with our work that we do was focusing on solutions and use cases where we can improve the staffing situation, right. We can't create people, but we all know that that's a crisis of right now with the, I guess we call it the great resignation now and staffing shortages and things and so taking a system and a tool that can really analyze if they have this fixed amount of stuff to get people in close air quotes and I think I can use them at a certain time of day, in a certain place to make the biggest impact and help with the most throughput analysis and reality of what I can do.
Laura: That's fascinating. Thank you. I guess one of the things that that really stood out to me just now is when you said, you know, being able to change a message that the airport is broadcasting based on some of the data that's coming in rather than having the same old spool of same through messages over and over and over again, but having some that pertains to, to what's happening, it's neat. So have you seen any changes at airports that you're excited about? Because the airports are, as you know, are constantly changing and so some things were probably already moving in some directions and some may have now switched, but what are you most excited about?
Cody: Yeah, that's a great question, Laura. There's been a substantial shift in sort of the areas that airports care about operationally in terms of passenger comfort and bringing passenger comfort in as a key part of the passenger experience. So yes, for us, you know the name of the game, the bread and butter for us has always been line queuing, predictive analytics about wait times and things like that and that has certainly not gone away. However, the throughput or occupancy in a live sense of restrooms, of concessions and retail spaces, are they full, you know, to what degree are they in use to the traffic that's going by them, jetbridges, the you know, live occupancy inside that from a density perspective, whether that's for either just health and safety reasons or also comfort reasons. Same thing for a lounge right. You might go into a departure lounge and scan your boarding pass on the way in, but you don't scan it on your way out, so it's unclear if the space is full or not.
Max: So like you said, the obvious application of Xovis’ technology is in queueing, so I think it's a security checkpoint of course. And then you mentioned that Xovis’ also has a non-airport business. So I think of that as maybe being shopping malls or concert halls or something where you're managing crowds. I guess the question is what kind of crossover is there for applications into restrooms and into holdrooms. Specifically, I guess you talked about it briefly but how does that specifically manifest? Are airport customers starting to install the systems in different places, and how do they use that information and that data?
Cody: Yes, that's really been an interesting concept. Crossover is the perfect word for it. Queues are one thing but sort of light occupancy and density is another right. So taking that you know airports have retail, airports want to know couple things, right. So in the like I said before with staffing it's you know they used to be open 18 hours a day, then reality set in, it's just not possible anymore. Maybe they're open 10 hours a day. What 10 hours should that be? You could address that based on sensor and analytic data from the storefront itself going in and out the sort of what we call footfall. You could do that from more from a passerby perspective of this segment of the terminal, this far out area, this like hammerhead, it only used, you know, afternoon peak. Let's take that data and make an assessment about what should be open or the mix of stores, same thing. You could even take that back to your leaseholds and say this part of the terminal has X amount of traffic, it's much busier. Prices are different for here based on actual data and science.
It's not quite as a business oriented thing with restrooms, but it's a passenger experience and comfort thing. So everybody is going to come off the plane when it arrives. Let's say a large 757, 210 passengers and they're all going to go to the same restroom. That restroom might have been cleaned 10 minutes before they arrived, but after they all went, it's totally wrecked. It's trashed, so let's not wait till we clean in the same rotation and that same hour. Let’s alert someone about that utilization and come back and clean it right away. That'll change your passenger experience, right? You know the very first thing you see when you get off a plane and assess a city, is that restroom experience. It's a real indicator and I know airports care about that more and more but how do you, again in a world of finite resources and staffing and things, make a thoughtful impact even with what you have?
Laura: You know, we've heard the restroom impact. We seem to be hearing it more and more. A couple years ago I was working with a client and the first thing that this person does when becoming airport manager is look at the restrooms. Because you're right, people judge airports by the restrooms and getting exactly that kind of an experience. You're getting off of an airplane. That's going to be a first impression of an airport.
Cody: Oh, you better believe it, yeah.
Laura: I know. It's good to hear that, that those kinds of things are playing into the analytics of it. So it's a two fold question. The first one is do you have because you mentioned people scan their ticket, getting onto the airplane but not getting off. For restrooms, would that be something that the passengers have to participate in or would that be something that there's an automatic system that counts movements in or out somehow without the passenger having to do something?
Cody: Yeah, so let me, let me backtrack a little and restate something if I wasn't clear. So I wasn't talking about necessarily boarding the plane, but entering like an elite lounge or a first class lounge or something like that. So taking that hand and that activity out completely you’re exactly right, we don't want to have them need to, let's say, proactively do something. So in our case, it's having a single sensor at the doorway and so it's a lounge or it's a bathroom. It's not a camera, it's a sensor which is important in a restroom, of course, and getting the automatic in-out and so that's where you'll get the data. That's going to be either say like an immediate alert, an e-mail, a text message for an operations team, or it could be presented publicly right in a screen that says “This, you know, this restroom is, you know, nine out of 10 people occupied”. We come with a fixed number for a certain space is full, and that could read to an individual person. Hey, OK, cool, there's still room for me. Or maybe someone a little more sensitive to that and they'd rather see a sign that has a line below it, you know, next restroom, 2 minutes walk to the left. And they know that that might be less crowded and more comfortable for them. So that could be, you know, a restroom, it could be a lounge, you know, any, any major hub might have multiple skyclubs or clubs and things. And yeah, but the one on the other side of the concourse, because I know that it's not as busy.
Laura: Awesome, so then my follow up was you’ve spoken a lot about exactly the density of people and all these things. If it wasn't restrooms and you had to make one suggestion about passenger experience, what would it be about improving the passenger experience?
Cody: I think it's about you know, airports are starting to have passenger traffic come back, so they're starting to have a little bit more money to spend, but they're obviously not back to the place they were. And I think that they want to make incremental improvements, but they also realize that, you know, let's say money talks in a way. And I think it's ACI that says a 1% increase in global passenger satisfaction, the ASQ generates a 1.5% increase in revenue growth, right? That's huge. And so if you can get passengers to spend more money, which is a result of them being happier, then waiting in line less, being stressed less, that can be up to, you know, a 45% difference for an unhappy passenger. Smooth processing, whether it's check-in, which is often kind of a little bit hectic, crazy, unstructured, or you know, as a security lane, I still think is a very important aspect of seeing that you know hey I can make a small incremental investment and see that rate of return immensely payout right while I'm helping that passenger have a better experience. I think it's something like about $500,000 often to build a single extra lane of a checkpoint. And so if you said, hey, I can target 10% throughput improvement on that lane, let's say from 200 people an hours is 220 and you have you have 10 lanes, then you've just gone from 2000 to 2200 passenger throughput an hour and you don't need to build that 11th lane. I think I got that math, right? That's kind of where I see it as a hey, like we don't have an open checkbook and unlimited funds allotment here so let's pause and take stock of what perhaps is lower hanging fruit that we can really improve the passenger experience with and bring it back to us financially.
Max: I think what you were talking about earlier, I know you didn't say this in your response to this question, but what you're talking about earlier about the transparency to passengers, I think could also be another way of enhancing the passenger experience. So a little anecdote from me recently. I was flying through Chicago and went to the Swissport Lounge in Terminal 5 and I stepped away for a second because I wanted to go grab some food outside at one of the concessions, and I come back to the lounge and there's a sign out front that says: sorry, this lounge is full. So I kind of hung out there for a few minutes and just waited and in that period of time I saw three people come out of the lounge, but no one came to remove the sign. So if there's some type of a way to put in a sensor that can just kind of automatically say, you know, lounge is at capacity and then as soon as somebody exits, OK, we have capacity for one more, something like that could be could be beneficial. And certainly with, you know, if social distancing is something that's going to stick around or that people are going to continue to be sensitive about or even thinking about for, God forbid, the next pandemic. This is something that we're going to need to be cognizant of when we're talking about tightly crowded retail spaces or lounges. If we want to keep these spaces open, we're going to need to have that type of transparency to users so that they can feel safe.
Cody: Totally. The use case you just walked through is a perfect one, right? You can then maximize the utility of that lounge that you were in, right? More people can be serviced. You can take the decision making away from the staff member who probably has five or six other things to worry about. And it's clear and it's informative for the passenger, right? That to me is a positive passenger experience.
Laura: So I have a slightly different question. I was reading on your interview in June with Authority magazine about baggage claim and one of the things that you mentioned is, is the system place for, you know, first bag on, last bag off, kind of an accountability of airlines. Can you talk a little bit more about that to reduce the crowding in baggage claim areas?
Cody: Yeah, that's another kind of area where, you know, where Xovis can play, let's say the eyes and the ears in different spots throughout the terminal. Baggage is another one of them, right? So you say I want to have a pointed sort of low cost visual understanding of what's going on. I want a report to understand utilization of different bag belts in a larger space, or understand how quickly a plane is being offloaded so the system can identify first bag on, last bag off, and then you know you'll see, are people crowding around the space for a long time beforehand or not, right, and then because, it's sort of, let's say the will of the airline to manage that, to report on that, to you know, rarely are there specific SLA’s the way that you'd see maybe in check in or something like that for that type of service. So this is definitely another area we can focus on.
Max: And how does that tie into, you know, a lot of airlines are trying to implement technologies where you as the passenger get essentially like an RFID chip associated with your bag. And so you as the passenger can more or less track where your bag is at all times. How does that tie into what Xovis is trying to do in baggage claim areas?
Cody: I would say it's parallel. Admittedly, I don't think that they are directly integrated. I think there are similar examples where they can be, but in our case that's sort of allowing the airport to maybe see what the airline is doing, right? You know, that's a similar use case. An airline may eventually have to remit data, let's say those seat factor load factors on a plane, but that comes in an aggregated form and it comes weeks after the occurrence, right? So if an airport puts a sensor or a Xovis system in a jet bridge, they get, you know, pretty much that same data right away. So it becomes a bit of a let's say a data grab, right? Data is a powerful currency and the airport wants to have perhaps what the airline has any airport that purchases of a system that the data is theirs to to do what they want, right? They could make it public, they could not. They can share it with anyone and share it with TSA, you know, or choose otherwise.
So that's kind of a story there, but perhaps something parallel would be in Seattle. Seattle has the Xovis system installed at all the security checkpoints, and they have those wait times, which can serve any passenger to any gate with any airline in the hands of the passenger to self load balance and to make a choice. That data is integrated into the Fly Delta app and so a passenger can receive information beforehand about where to go and little experience wait wise.
Laura: So we always like to end on a positive note. So what does a positive passenger experience mean to you?
Cody: So good question, Laura. I think the punch line is, is that it's frictionless. It's sort of like you're IT set up at work. You don't want to think about it and all the while things are being kind of shaped and presented to you thoughtfully, right? So whether you're a frequent business traveler or jetsetter or maybe that once every few years leisure flyer, the physical and digital setup of the terminal is clear to you right? Is check in structured? Do you know if you should line up right and then OK where you should line up? Is someone seeing you off on that journey and do they know where they can wait, and not get clobbered by a bunch of people rushing by. At the same time, you know, maybe there is a long line for security and you can't even see the end of it because of the way that the queuing space is set up. But if you have some information that tells you: hey, it's actually 7 minutes. It's OK. You know, maybe the first time I'm a little skeptical and then I see through, go through and experience it. It really was 7 minutes OK? Like OK, next time I see that you know I'm going to trust it. I'm going to be relaxed and you know back to our, you know former, statement that's the passenger comfort that we all kind of wished for today is to see, you know, experience and have transparency. Is that information available to you? Maybe it's even like I said, told you in advance and then you know so on and so forth, right? That's, you know, the things are open and transparent, kind of tailored to you because the airport itself has that operational vantage point to see anything and everything that's important from, you know, the immigration hall when you land from international arrival all the way back to the jet bridge at your next departure.
Laura: Two words, frictionless and transparent. I like that. Thank you so much, Cody, for joining us today. It's been a really interesting conversation.
Cody: Laura, it's my pleasure. Max, thank you as well.
Max: Thanks, Cody.
[Outro]
Wendy: Thanks for joining us in The Hold Room for this special podcast series exploring the new passenger experience. You can find more from this series on the ACC Training Hub—that’s training.acconline.org/the-hold-room—or wherever you get your podcasts, including Apple Podcast, Spotify, Stitcher, etc. Follow us for more content from the Airport Consultants Council. You can support this podcast by leaving a rating or review and by telling your friends and colleagues about the podcast. Thanks again.
