Everyone knows to arrive early for a flight, but many still end up dragging kids and luggage up the down escalator in a last-minute panic. Airports are big busy places, unfamiliar and disorienting, and it’s very easy to be in an airport early and still get lost.
Heathrow handles more than 75 million passengers a year, and all six London airports together see more than 163 million. That’s the highest number of travellers passing through any city in the world, and numbers continue to grow. The combined total from all British airports is a staggering 300 million. Needless to say, every language group in the world is represented, and all of them need directions.
Communication Is Everything
With such heavy footfall, airports also have to be commercial centres dedicating signage to food, drink, duty-free goods, temporary accommodation and other services. Although airport communications and displays are often cutting-edge, you can have a good thing in excess. The sheer number of neon displays actually makes it harder to find the one thing you need.
If there is any solution to this conundrum, more intelligent, dynamic and flexible signage will have to be part of it.
How Signage Can Revolutionise Our Airports
Digital signage has two enormous advantages over old style billboards, posters and window displays. Firstly, it can serve multiple purposes, allowing more information or more advertising in an uncluttered package. Creative transformations attract attention without bombarding the traveller with noise.
Secondly, it can be interactive. Touch screens introduce huge opportunities for targeting information where and when it is needed, and you don’t need instructions in 256 languages to use it. More information about interactive signage can be obtained from suppliers such as moodmedia.co.uk/digital-signage-solutions.
The data collected by signage that can absorb user input can be linked to algorithms that adjust the content in real-time to match emerging trends or tailor it for each specific individual. Intelligent signage can perform market research or analyse its own efficiency in meeting user demand and adjust itself accordingly.
Extend this idea to the scale of an entire airport and perhaps you can begin to see the potential. Our airports will soon be adapting instantly to the people travelling through them at any given time – presenting only the most salient information each individual or group requires and the most welcome products and services.
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