Sydney Airport: Investing In Our Customer Experience

Transcript

Geoff Culbert:Well, thank you very much. Thanks, Peter. Thanks for having me here today. So as Peter said, I'm relatively new in the role, so 6 months, but I think after 6 months you sort of can't claim to be new anymore. I get asked 2 questions consistently about being in the job, and one of those is, Am I enjoying it? And the answer is unequivocally yes. I had one foot in the aviation industry in my previous role at GE through the aircraft engines business, but I'm thoroughly enjoying being involved in the industry full-time. It's just such a wonderful industry to be involved with, so I am definitely enjoying it. Second question I get asked is what surprised me, and there are a number of things. positive and negative. On the positive side, I've been surprised by the passion that people have for the industry. I see it at Sydney Airport, I see it at the 30,000— in the 30,000 people who work on the airport precinct. There's a real passion and commitment to that industry which is rare. I mean, I've worked in a lot of different industries and I don't see the same level of passion and commitment that I see in this industry, which is something that we really need to capture and bottle. I've also just been really pleasantly surprised on the upside by the strength of the macro tailwinds that sit behind our industry with the rise of global tourism and travel, and Peter's presentation pulled out some of those stats. I've also been surprised by the level of fragmentation in the industry, and I'm talking here airport to airport, airport to airline, and that has been a surprise to me. And I think there's, there's, there's, there's good collaboration going on, but nowhere near as much as is possible. And the thing is, we all share the same common customer, which is the end passenger. So we have a really strong anchor around which we can collaborate. And a priority of my leadership at Sydney Airport is to focus on the end passengers as our customers and to find ways to collaborate with those in the industry to deliver a really outstanding experience for our customers. This page here gives you a snapshot of the— of Sydney Airport and the size of the industry that's going on at Sydney Airport. And you can read the stats on this page. We have 43 million passengers a year, 150,000 passengers coming through the terminals every day. We have 800 businesses operating on the airport precinct— small, medium, large businesses— 30,000 employees. And to Peter's point, the economic generation that goes out from the airport into the broader community as a consequence of the tourism industry and the travel industry is enormous. Around about $30 billion a year in economic generation and responsible for 300,000 jobs. So this is an enormous, enormous opportunity for us to work together in a really significant way to collaborate and to deliver for our end customers, the passengers, and that's what I'm all about. And this is the way I look at it. I see this as a connected continuum as the passenger goes from their home on their couch right through to the gate. And being honest, I think historically we have viewed each of these touchpoints to a certain degree in isolation, and that's a product of the way that we have set up as an airport. And I see it also in our customers in the airlines and our stakeholders around the airport. So from our perspective, our aero team thinks about the check-in and gate experience, our retail team thinks about the terminal experience, Our lineside operations team thinks about access and roads into the airport and car parking. We think a little bit about the customer at home on their couch, but nowhere near as much as we should. And we need to collaborate with everyone in the industry to be able to unlock this opportunity. And the fact is, I think we are, as an industry, we're missing opportunities. We're missing opportunities to provide a better experience for our customers. And we're missing opportunities to unlock pools of revenue that we can all share in if we do collaborate around this continuum of the travel experience. So I want to take you through some of the stuff that we're doing at Sydney Airport to give you a sense of the things that we're working on and what's important to us and important to me. So starting with the couch and right through to access at the airport, Look, we're doing and we've done plenty of good stuff. We've just completed our 5-year ground transport plan. We invested over $200 million on roads in and around the airport. We've introduced a range of different options into our car parking. We've got free parking options. We've got discounts. We are extending back out into the customer on the couch through our online offerings, which offer a range of different options for our customers. We've got— We've introduced rideshare with the likes of Uber. We're promoting the train even though we don't have an economic interest in that train because we know that congestion's a challenge and we want to have a full range of modal opportunities available to our customers. But the fact is that congestion is still a problem at Sydney Airport because we live in a city of 5 million people and we're located 8 kilometres from the CBD. 50% of the traffic that comes around Sydney Airport isn't even going to the airport. They're going down to the port, and you see a lot of heavy traffic there. They're people who live in the southern part of Sydney who are cutting through to the city. And so the congestion on the roads is definitely a challenge, and we've got to— we need to be thinking differently about the way that we engage with customers around that and make sure they get to the airport with a faster and more pleasurable journey. So I'm really interested in the fact that we really only deal with the customer when they hit the curbside in this regard. So why wouldn't we be working with the airlines to develop applications whereby we can send a message to the customer the day before they travel to say, hey, estimated travel time to the airport tomorrow is 35 minutes from where you live. And by the way, here's a link to Uber. Here's a link to taxis. And by the way, here's a voucher for some retail inside the airport. Right? And then on the day of travel, if the traffic's bad, if there's an accident, we send a push notification to the customer to say, Hey, you might want to leave a little bit earlier. And by the way, here's a link to Uber, here's a link to the taxi, here's a travel voucher. We just don't do that. Now, we don't do that at the airport because we don't own the customer information. We have the traffic information, we're not connected, and we're missing an opportunity in this regard. We're going to continuously invest in the roads. The Gateway Project is a major part of this. This is the road that comes off WestConnex. We're very deeply advanced in our discussions with the state government around that. We're trying to come up with a road design that will survive the long term. We want a road design that's going to be sustainable, that's going to reduce congestion around the airport, not just for passengers travelling to the airport, but for the community that lives around the airport. And the design that we're coming up with has the potential, the possibility, to mean that you could drive from Parramatta, from Castle Hill, or from Seaforth to the airport to the curbside at domestic without one single traffic light. That would be awesome. That's what we're aiming for. So that's about accessibility and dealing with the customer. Plenty of opportunity for collaboration there. When you get to check-in, I think this is an area where we've seen real improvements and we have seen good collaboration. So we've got automated check-in and bag drop now in the terminal. We've got a good partnership with Qantas in that regard. Here's a little video which just shows you the difference that automated check-in makes compared to manual check-in. This is actually a model that we ran which has the same number of passengers going through automated check-in versus going through manual check-in. As you can see, starts off pretty similar. After 5 minutes, the experience is the same in automated. It actually starts to back up at manual. Get to 10 minutes, really starts to get heavy at the manual check-ins. And you can see the difference there. We think this really is the future in providing a better experience for our customers as we go through the check-in experience. One interesting thing for me though in this regard is that it's kind of democratised the check-in process. So the economy class passenger gets the same experience as the premium passenger. So we need to work together to work out how do we actually maintain that premium experience for the customers that are looking for it, given the price they've paid for their ticket. The other thing I want to talk about is the ability to actually make this consistent across the airport so that every airline has the opportunity to deliver this kind of thing for their passengers, rather than having a hotchpotch of different check-in processes and technology which provides a very different experience. I've had a number of airlines approach me to say, we'd like to do something like that ourselves, And the answer is, look, we'd love to do that with you. We'd love to work with you on providing an automated check-in experience that provides a better experience and a faster experience for your end customers. Once you get through the check-in process and the bag drop process, you get to security. I think we've made significant improvements there over the last few years, once again, as a consequence of collaboration with Border Force. Our electronic gates are great. They've reduced check-in time from 4 minutes on average down to 23 seconds, and we're about to leapfrog into the next phase of that technology with our biometrics, where your face will be your passport. And we're doing a collaboration at the moment once again with Qantas and with Border Force on that technology. And this is great. This is going to completely revolutionise the security experience. It's— and it's going to go right back to check-in, bag drop, security, lounge access, and access to the gate. But the thing that's really surprised me and interested me in this regard is that I think every airport in Australia and every airport around the world is running a biometrics program at the moment. And they're all doing it with something— with slightly different technology. And I just ask myself, as someone who's outside of the industry, why is that? Why are we all working on a different form of the same technology? Why aren't we getting together and collaborating around that technology and using our size, our scale, our purchasing power to come up with a common platform that we all benefit from in terms of reducing cost, in terms of reducing time to roll it out, in terms of providing the customers, the end passengers, with a consistent experience? That's the fragmentation I'm talking about, and I think we need to work on that, and there's tonnes of opportunity. Once you get through check-in and security and you're into the terminal, I think this is where— an area where we've done some great work at Sydney Airport. The terminal experience is far superior to what it used to be. We've got— done a significant refresh of Terminal 1, our international terminal, and Terminal 2. When we take over operational control of Terminal 3, in the middle of next year. We think there's a real opportunity to refresh that terminal. Nothing's really been done there for a decade, and we want to bring it up to the same standard that we've got in Terminal 1 and Terminal 2. Terminal 1 International in particular is just getting great feedback. We've done some wonderful stuff with the introduction of new retail and our luxury precinct. We've got some really world-class dining experiences there now. For the first time, you actually don't have to go to the lounge to get a decent meal. You can get a meal by Wolfgang Puck, by Mike McInerney, Luke Magnan. So actually really great chefs who are providing a world-class dining experience in the terminal. And that's where I want us to go. Like, I want to bring a little bit of glamour and excitement back to travel because travel is an emotional experience. And people come to the airport and a lot of them are travelling for a holiday or they're going to visit friends and families and they're excited. And And I don't want travel just to be a means to an end. I want them to get into the terminal and have a great emotional experience so that their actual— their holiday begins not when they get to the end destination, but when they get to the airport. That's what we're going to look at. We're also investing in things that our customers tell us are most important to them, things like wayfinding. And we've done a lot of work with technology, with Google, Maps and Apple Maps and Baidu Maps for our Chinese passengers. We've invested a lot of money in updating our charging stations, which is an area we get a lot of feedback on. And we've also invested a lot of money in upgrading our bathrooms. And this is reflected in our customer feedback scores, which you can see here on the screen. We've had significant improvement in our scores, and you can see that from The chart up here, and these are gathered from thousands of surveys that we do with customers who pass through the terminal every day. Interesting to me is that while our scores have gone up, the feedback that we get is that we still need to improve on things like wayfinding, charging stations, and bathrooms. So we're going to double down on that effort to make sure we continually provide a better experience for our customers as they pass through the terminal. Another area where we need to double down in our effort is on the arrivals experience. As a consequence of the increase in passengers coming through the airport, we are now at a point where we're seeing more busing, and we need to actually build more gates to be able to reduce the busing and give people more access to gates when they arrive. And we have an investment plan to achieve that. Once they get into the terminal, I think the arrivals experience at Sydney Airport is underwhelming. I don't think it has a sense of excitement about it, and we want to have something that people can be really proud of. We want to have an environment where people get into the terminal, whether they're an overseas tourist travelling to Australia for the first time or whether they're an Australian coming home, they think, wow, this is great. For our overseas travellers, it's something they say, well, OK, I'm in Australia. I feel it. I sense it. This is exciting. My holiday has started now. And for Australians coming home after a long trip abroad, they breathe and they say, wow, it's great to be back in Australia. And I'm proud. I'm proud of this experience. I'm proud of this airport. Once you get to security, once again, I think the eGates that we've introduced have been really great. The processing time is fast and we get a lot of fantastic and positive feedback about that. Interestingly, it means we're getting people into our baggage hall much faster and the feedback we get is, oh, your bags are taking longer to come out. The answer is no, they're not, you're just getting there faster. So we need to actually work on that. That's now become the choke point and this is an area for collaboration. Now we're going to build a new bag room at Sydney Airport and we've got an investment plan to do that because We're starting to get full in our existing bag rooms, so we'll make that investment. That's our commitment. But I've been surprised and interested in the fact that we actually don't control, as an airport, the baggage process. The baggage handling at that point of the exercise is managed by the airlines, and there really is inconsistent outcomes in respect to baggage in that regard. And my thought on this is, why aren't we collaborating together to incentivise that process so that we actually get an outcome that we can all be pleased with and we're striving to be better? Yeah. And we're incentivising everyone to be better because we want the passengers who come through Sydney Airport, whether they be Australians coming home or international tourists, to have a great experience. So let's work together to make sure that we're setting SLAs, we're setting KPIs, we're incentivising better outcomes because we all want that and we all need it. So these are the areas that I'm thinking about, right from the couch through to the gate, back through the arrivals experience. And if you look at the, the future, it's really exciting. If I look at the traffic volumes at Sydney Airport going back 20 years, you can see them on the chart, they've grown significantly. We're now at 43 million passengers a year. We're releasing our master plan this year, and the estimate is that we'll be at 65 million passengers by the year 2039. That's a million passengers more every year. We're growing at 1 million passengers a year. Huge opportunity for everyone. The pie keeps growing. So that's something that I'm really excited about. But we need to collaborate more. We need to work together more to unlock the opportunities that exist on the back of that. And as I've said at the start, and what I've said all along, it's about delivering for our common customer. It's the passengers. Delivering for our common customer The passengers. We are incredibly well poised as an industry. There is enormous opportunity for everyone. It's an exciting time to be in the industry, and I'm really excited to be a part of it. I'm really pleased to be a part of the industry. There's a massive opportunity for everyone. We all stand to benefit if we work together to realise that opportunity. That is my plan. That's my commitment to all of you. Thank you, Geoff. And I look forward to working with all of you. Thank you.

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