Can we get to a Seamless Passenger Journey to, Through and From the Airport?

Steve Karoly, Senior Director, Innovation and Program Delivery, Vantage Airport Group

Steve Karoly, Senior Director, Innovation and Program Delivery, Vantage Airport Group

In recent years, buzz has been building around the subject of a seamless passenger journey for air travelers. Numerous articles, advertisements and pronouncements have championed the need for airlines and airports working together to provide a friction-free journey through the airport for millions of travelers each year. It’s a critical and compelling challenge, with many players offering quickly evolving solutions.

"To develop a truly seamless passenger journey to, through and from the airport will require the development and implementation of an integrated and distributed data architecture across a system of systems."

In 2016, airlines, airports and the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) began exploring a “curb to gate” security solution. The reasons for this approach were many: an evolving threat landscape, with security solutions not keeping pace with increasingly agile threats; growing global passenger traffic and a corresponding increase in customer expectations; constrained physical footprints at security checkpoints; and shrinking budgets.

As the scope of the journey has grown beyond curb-to-gate, so too has our thinking. The aviation community, including the TSA, has broadened its definition of the journey to encompass the entire passenger journey to, through and from the airport, from “reservation to destination.” Looking at the aviation security functional area, this definition means that security isn’t just about the checkpoint, but rather an integrated and distributed security system of systems across the entire airport environment, a process that starts well before a passenger arrives at an airport and ends when they reach their destination.

The aviation community continues to expand this reservation-to-destination vision to include other functional areas of the aviation ecosystem, such as ground transportation, airport commercial points of sale, hospitality, amenities and experiences, and more.

To develop a truly seamless passenger journey to, through and from the airport will require the development and implementation of an integrated and distributed data architecture across a system of systems. Such a system will demand transformational changes across a range of operations, including changes to legislation governing data privacy, willingness to collaborate and share data with multiple stakeholders, upgrades to infrastructure and cybersecurity to support and promote data sharing, and standardizing data management.

The optimum time to make this happen is when an airport is initiating a major capital redevelopment or renovation. With its involvement in major airport terminal and concession redevelopment projects at a number of U.S. airports, including LaGuardia’s Terminal B, Chicago’s Midway International and JetBlue’s planned international terminal at

John F. Kennedy International, Vantage Airport Group, alongside its aviation partners like JetBlue Technology Ventures, is uniquely positioned to help implement such a holistic system.

Ultimately, a truly seamless journey for the passenger – our shared customer – will demand participation from and collaboration amongst every entity that touches that journey. Airlines, airport authorities and operators, law enforcement, federal government entities like the TSA and Customs and Border Protection, ground transportation providers and transit operators, hospitality and concessions managers – will all have to work together to develop and implement an integrated and distributed architecture across the system of systems that will securely move needed digital data to include a passengers’ secure mobile identity.

Essential to the aviation community’s success in this effort will be a mutual understanding of several key principles: the passenger owns their data and identity and can say what is shared and with whom; the integrated system must offer passengers opt-in and opt-out abilities; and cybersecurity and privacy protection requirements must be set at the most rigorous and restrictive levels to ensure passenger safety.

Given all of these factors, the question is whether the aviation community, composed of both private and public entities, can work across parochial boundaries to develop this capability. Only time will tell.

Data Management

Agile