Airport staffing, travel retail and experiential marketing specialist Blackjack Promotions says it has seen a “massive growth in demand” for market research services during the year to date, as clients focus on understanding how passengers use airports.
In recent months, Blackjack has been awarded new contracts or had existing contracts extended with a number of airports, including Stansted, London Luton and Dubai International – the world’s busiest international passenger airport.
Head of Domestic Retail at Blackjack Promotions Fiona Tindall comments: “Airports can be incredibly challenging locations to carry out face-to-face research. Travellers can be tired, distracted and stressed, while there may be restrictions on how and where staff can deliver marketing activities and what they can say to people, particularly when you’re working air-side, beyond the security barriers.”
Tindall adds: “It’s vital that brand ambassadors working within the airport environment understand how travellers think and how to approach them in a way that reduces stress levels, rather than adding to them. Staff require much higher levels of diplomacy and general customer service skills than they would need in a traditional retail environment”.
At Stansted, Blackjack staff have been working over the summer (the airport’s busiest period), monitoring the quality of user experience, including queue lengths, passenger traffic flow, congestion points and other issues relevant to the journey through the terminal.
At Luton, Blackjack was appointed to provide field agents to support an airport quality survey programme. London Luton Airport (LLA) constantly monitors all aspects of the passenger experience and was also keen to understand how passengers feel about its redevelopment programme, launched in 2016. That contract has now been extended for three years.
At Dubai, Blackjack was appointed to deliver research services to understand more about the passenger experience and how they could improve passenger satisfaction. The data delivered by this initial programme was so valuable that Dubai has extended it to run until May 2018, and has also added a ‘mystery shopping’ function.
For Dubai, Blackjack had to source multilingual research staff to cover 32 passenger interaction points across four terminals, 365 days a year. They input questionnaire responses on to tablets and upload the data in real time for Dubai Airports to access.
Originally posted Frontier Magazine | November 2017
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