Birmingham Airport
Delivering a cutting edge 'headless' digital experience for a top 10 UK airport
Enhancing passenger services and supporting future growth
Background
Birmingham Airport (BHX) is the UK’s fastest growing airport. With ample connections from the North and travel from London via HS2 taking 37 minutes, they expect to double passenger numbers to 18m a year by 2033.
It's an airport on the move, undergoing a huge program of change to improve the passenger experience and increase revenues. Critically they are one of the first UK airports to launch the Next Generation Security system, a game changer for passengers. Their new website had to coincide with this.
Business challenge
The existing website was inflexible and suffered security vulnerabilities causing regular downtime. Important content updates were slow to release, while key passenger information from third-party integrations was unreliable.
The BHX team wanted to change the perception of being a ‘car park with a runway attached’. While parking will always be a large revenue driver, one of the key business goals focused on engaging passengers early on, highlighting their improved airport facilities and enhancing the passenger experience inside the airport.
Accessibility is a big issue within airports so they wanted to explore how the website could support the Assisted Travel passenger experience.
Changes in technology are expensive and carry risks, so they wanted to ‘future-proof’ their digital technology by using a platform that would support content delivery across multiple channels and ensure that complex integrations would be accommodated.
Planning and research
The BHX team wanted to rethink their digital approach completely, so we started with a strategic discovery phase to unpack the role of the website and digital content well into the future.
It was vital to align the stakeholder team on project goals and objectives while also capturing the views of wider stakeholders and passengers.
We explored their brand vision and developed passenger profiles to design a new experience that would support the airport through the future of their airport infrastructure upgrade work.
Focusing on passenger needs
Great usability is vital to support passenger needs but also aligned to commercial goals. We conducted qualitative research and Customer Satisfaction surveys to gain insights into passenger behaviours and needs. We carried out early-stage user testing with passengers, using initial designs to validate key user journeys.
Our research showed that passengers wanted a more focused digital experience once in the airport, so we created an innovative in-airport app-style experience, accessed using QR codes, to keep customers informed while supporting airside departure spend/passenger. Location based services are delivered using the airports internal beacon positioning.
We particularly focused on ways to improve assisted travel experience (expectations setting and facilities/mapping)
Our solution
A critical decision was the choice of web platform that would underpin BHX’s digital strategy for the next 5 years. We ran our 5-stage CMS selection process and recommended Contentful, a headless CMS solution. This was perfect for BHX for the following reasons:
- Headless is an ‘API first’ technology designed to integrate with multiple content and data services such as global flight feeds, parking systems and weather data.
- It consolidates content under one roof supporting omnichannel delivery across websites, app’s and in airport kiosks.
- It is completely flexible and scalable so no barriers to growth.
Let’s move you forward
Are your digital experiences holding you back in some way, or do you need to propel the business forward, quickly?
Get in touch
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