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Check in to make your flying journey smarter
Airports are trying to engage customers and passengers with a complex array of social media platforms.

dubai - App aggregates information about airports all over the world

By Sanjiv Purushotham
 Value Mining

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Published: Mon 5 Nov 2018, 3:30 PM

Last updated: Mon 5 Nov 2018, 5:35 PM

HI-TRAC
The author's shorthand for Happiness Index, Infrastructure, Talent, Regulations, Access and Capital. The six pillars that make the UAE a great place for a startup. This week's article is about Happiness, Talent and Access.

This week's article is about the only startup in the Mena region that is amongst the exclusive cohort of 20 innovations accelerated by the Airbus BizLab. This group has been selected from among hundreds which applied to this highly regarded programme.

Paradoxically, the more automation and digitisation happen in the aviation industry, the more jobs get created. On its own, the industry directly employs 10.2 million people. And indirectly over 55 million people depend on it (Aviation Benefits Beyond Borders) - in tourism, in the aircraft industry, in services.

These 65 million jobs serve over four billion passengers on scheduled flights alone (2017 - Statista). According to the Airports Council International's (ACI) World Airport Traffic Report, there are currently 17,678 commercial airports that these passengers flew in and out from globally.

In terms of commercials, the global airline industry is close to a trillion dollars in revenue annually (Statista's estimate - $834 billion in 2018). Just the in-flight catering services market has been estimated at $15.54 billion in 2017, with a CAGR of over six per cent between 2018 and 2023 (Global In-Flight Catering Services Market - Analysis of Growth, Trends and Forecast by Mordor Intelligence). The ACI reported that in 2014, the airports industry made a revenue of $142.5 billion with a year-on-year growth rate of 8.2 per cent.

People are just enamoured by the industry. Even specialised analytics-driven applications such as Flightstats and Hopper are popular with passengers. The digital space is filling up rapidly with applications that are connected directly or indirectly with the experience of flying.

Hey Flyer was born when Jai Tolani and Mandip Kanjiya toyed with the concept of a social network for frequent flyers. For example, is there someone at the airport or on the flight that you're on that you would like to connect with? They developed an app called MeetMe@Airport for fun and put it on the stores.

Tolani quipped: "With absolutely no advertising, we started getting hundreds of sign-ups a month. We pulled ourselves away from a couple of pet projects and began refining the app, renaming it Hey Flyer."

Tolani said: "We listened to our users. People wanted information about airports, airport facilities, check-in processes, baggage-loss handling, places to eat, onboard catering, immigration formalities, customs procedures and inflight entertainment and connectivity [IFEC], amongst a host of other information. Our team began the laborious process of aggregating the data from over 2,000 airports worldwide. The immediate tangible result was that the average search time for specific facilities or information was reduced by over 10X and brought down to less than 10 seconds from the average of two minutes hitherto."

Airports are trying to engage customers and passengers with a complex array of social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, Telegram as well as a plethora of dedicated websites and apps. For these organisations, Tolani said: "An API-based aggregator of information simplifies this complexity. That's what Hey Flyer provides."

At the same time, airlines want to make the in-flight experience far more efficient. They take on capital as well as variable expenditure. Consequently, the available load per flight decreases. For example, premium airlines like Emirates focus on superior experience and deploy upwards of 25 cabin crew on an Airbus A380 flight, much higher than the norm of one crew member per 50 passengers. Despite this, passenger requests may get missed. IFEC systems are expensive and heavy. Once installed, passengers are limited by the choice available and the quality of the hardware. These are gaps that can be filled through digitisation.

Tolani added: "Hey Flyer throws a digital cloud across the aircraft with a media-server. This cloud creates inter as well as intra connectivity between crew and passengers. Also, passengers can choose their content from the media-server and consume it via their favourite devices. Over 65 per cent of passengers prefer to use their own media devices onboard."

Worth keeping a watch on this startup.

The writer is founding partner at Bridge DFS, a bespoke financial advisory firm (www.bridgeto.us). Views expressed are his own and do not reflect the newspaper's policy. He can be contacted at sanjiv@bridgeto.us


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