With A new ‘Virtual Interline’ Concept Under Testing, London Stansted Believes Innovation Is Key To Developing The ‘Airport Of The Future’

Transcript

Aboudy Nasser:So we're changing the way that airports work. We very much see ourselves as the airport of the future. I think most airports see themselves as an infrastructure business that essentially work to provide a space for an aircraft to land and for passengers to load and offload. We see ourselves very much as part of the end-to-end process with airlines, right from the point of sale through to the way the customer experiences their journey up until the time they get on board of an aircraft. So we've put in place a number of initiatives to help those airlines sell and provide a superb customer experience. In terms of the selling side of the business, we actually now have a dedicated whose role is to go out and build corporate relationships. So our region around the sort of North London, East of England is the fastest-growing region in the UK. Actually, it's outstripped Silicon Valley economic growth in the US 3 times. It's growing 35% faster than the rest of the UK economy, and the number of new corporates that are coming in, particularly in the biotech and financial sectors, So we've decided to build a team whose role is to go and work with, build the relationships with the biotech companies, with the likes of AstraZeneca, GlaxoSmithKline, and then essentially work then with the airlines to introduce them to the corporate market. So they have a ready-made supply of corporate traffic. So on the sales side, we're doing a lot of innovative stuff like that, working with the airlines. In terms of the customer experience side, we've just finished spending £100 million We've got another billion-dollar investment coming in to completely transform the customer experience. One of the things that we're doing around that is putting together what we call a new virtual interline or seamless transfer product. Again, this helps the airlines because it allows them to sell connecting traffic from their website or from any other sort of distribution way of selling and to provide the customer a seamless seamless experience at our airport when transferring, which is totally unique, never been done before, and frankly quite revolutionary in the industry. So the traditional models that exist around connectivity and self-connect all require the passenger to arrive, clear immigration, go to the baggage hall, pick up their bags, go back in, check the bags back in, exit, change terminals, come back. That is not a good customer experience. What we've done now, and we've just concluded our first full end-to-end test, is to enable airlines to cooperate without having to enter into any sort of agreement, without having to negotiate SPAs, without having to integrate their systems, to sell connecting itineraries, and most importantly of all, and what differentiates us, is it allows the passenger to have a seamless experience as if it was a coacher. So the big difference from what we've done to what exists at the moment, the passenger will arrive, they will literally go through, back through screening and into the departure lounge. There's no need to pick up their bags, there's no need to exit, no need to check in again. So that's really quite unique. It serves to help drive incremental business for the airline. It serves to provide a superb customer experience for the passenger. Absolutely. I mean, when you look at London Heathrow, 80 million passengers a year, it's full, right? It's full, it makes a tremendous amount of noise and pollution, and you've already got those 2 runways. Going to that 3rd runway, if it ever happens, it's just going to create more chaos around, you know, the infrastructure of that region. Gatwick, currently at 39 million passengers, I think going to 40— sorry, 46 going up to 53. But their problem is their runway capacity. So their runway capacity is full. They have the terminal capacity, and that's why you see them going after wide-body operators to try and build passenger numbers, because they've got that scarce resource. What we have now, we've invested in our building, in our terminal, We always had the runway capacity, 55 movements an hour, but we didn't have the terminal capacity. So London Stansted, as a London airport, is now the best place to grow to our capacity, which currently is 35 million. We're at 29 million, so we've still got some scope without needing to do much in terms of building new runways, whether it's at Heathrow or Gatwick. And we've also got the permission to go to 43, and that can be done actually on our existing runway. So our permission takes us— allows us to build a new arrivals terminal right next door to our existing terminal and take us to 43 million passengers off one runway.

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