NEW white paper: The silent airport is a smarter way to operate
Amsterdam – Dutch software company AviaVox, which develops intelligent artificial voice systems for public announcements in airports, has published a white paper about the benefits of the ‘silent airport’.
While it may seem contradictory for a business involved in public announcements to promote the idea of silence, in fact the white paper explains what becoming a silent airport means in practice while detailing the many commercial, operational and brand-related advantages for airports.
According to Johan Godin, managing director of AviaVox, a silent airport isn’t actually silent: “Going silent doesn’t mean doing away with your announcements; on the contrary, it means designing a smarter passenger announcement policy. This leaves passengers with the impression that there are fewer announcements, even though the overall number may remain the same or even increase.
“For example, instead of virtually every announcement being broadcast to virtually every passenger in the terminal – which is counter-productive, because passengers just tune them out – we recommend making much more carefully targeted announcements. That way, only the most relevant messages are heard by the right passengers, in the right zones, at the right times.”
Becoming a silent airport can have far-reaching and even surprising benefits for airports. The primary objective is to reduce passenger anxiety; however, there are multiple knock-on effects including improving passenger flow, enabling airport staff to be more effective, increasing retail and hospitality spend, reducing passenger complaints, and achieving regulatory compliance.
According to Johan Godin, “Most airports are just a cacophony of sound, in an environment which already has poor acoustics because of all the hard surfaces. Relentless and repetitive public address announcements can be too much for passengers to deal with, so they ignore them – either without realising that they’re doing it or deliberately, by wearing headphones or earbuds, for example.
“We already know that most passengers are stressed when they arrive at the airport; from there on, it’s largely up to the airport as to whether they allow those stress levels to rise, which is helpful to no one, or whether to work on reducing that stress. Designing a genuinely effective public announcement system is in everyone’s best interests, not least because passengers will know what they need to do and when, so they can relax and make it to their departure gate on time.”
The AviaVox white paper explores the causes and effects of passenger stress, and why it benefits everyone when airports support passengers in becoming more self-reliant. It details what it means to become a silent airport, and how an intelligent artificial voice system should be at the heart of the solution. There’s also a helpful checklist for how to implement a silent airport policy.
The Silent Airport and the Ambient Soundscape from AviaVox is available now as a free download from International Airport Review (https://www.internationalairportreview.com/whitepaper/172521/the-silent-airport-and-the-ambient-soundscape/).