AIRTIME: Passenger Experience

AIRTIME: Passenger Experience

The aviation industry has an undeniable obsession with the term Passenger Experience, and rightly so. Those two words underpin the vast majority of our endeavours in cabin, service and onboard product design.

Our collective understanding is that if we improve Passenger Experience, success will follow – success in terms of NPS scores, Skytrax ratings, airline revenue, positive media, awards. All of this is true, continuing to be proven year on year.

When something is so clearly at the heart of everything you do, when your success, and the success of your team, your organisation, rests so pivotally on two simple words, it is critical to wholly understand their meaning.

So, what exactly is Passenger Experience? For if we do not understand it, it is rather hard to improve it.

Emotion-Driven

Passenger Experience is, fundamentally, how things make us feel. It is our emotional reaction to elements of the journey which compound upon one another, to shape an overall feeling at the end.

From check-in to arrival, the collection of small moments, interactions and time spent in environments, accumulate to form what we call our ‘experience’. If these things are predominantly positive, we form a positive emotional connection to our journey, and we reflect upon an overall positive experience. And of course, the opposite applies.

It is important to understand that emotions are cumulative.

If we experience two or three consecutive positive moments placing us in a good headspace, we can generally accept if one moment is then a negative one – we can brush it off, it is an anomaly. But if we have an accumulation of negative moments; queuing too long, IFE screen not working, delayed drinks service… then a drink gets spilled… that small human error feels much larger than it is.

Therefore, designing a great passenger experience relies upon our ability to create cumulative positive moments.

Cumulative, Sensory Moments

For First and Business Class travellers, the bar is set high. These passengers have elevated expectations for what their travel experience should be. Environment plays a significant part, but it is somewhat expected. The airport lounge should be spacious, stylish and well-serviced – this is expected. The seat should be spacious, lie-flat, and with a great IFE screen – this is expected. There should be a degree of privacy – this too, is expected. Meeting these demands through cabin design, lounge environments – these things are critical for airlines to get right, but they do not elevate the premium passenger experience beyond expectations.

In the premium travel sector, what sets top carriers apart is their ability to create sensory moments which create an immediate positive emotional reaction in their passengers.

Sensory moments are exactly what you may think. Moments which in some way stimulate our senses; what we see, hear, touch, smell and taste.

Sight

What we see when we immediately board the aircraft and arrive at our seat. In premium cabins, how that seat presents is really important. If the bedding product sits on the seat wrapped in a polybag, it does not create a positive sensory moment. If the amenity kit is not visually impactful, or does not display an alluring brand, it is a missed opportunity to create a ‘wow’ moment for the traveller.

Sound

Aural stimulus covers elements such as background music and IFE content, of course. But perhaps more important is the tone and communication style of the crew. This is where our assessment of service really comes from; a combination of what we see and hear. Crew interactions are what defines service – be it good or bad – and so placing a focus on what cabin crew say, and how they say it, is an important factor in crafting positive sensory moments.

Touch

Understanding touch is vital to creating a positive Passenger Experience. All of those onboard products, as well as the hard product that make up the environment, really matter. The seat, its materiality and firmness of course contribute to comfort. From a soft product perspective, each item that a passenger touches filtrates their subconscious, they make an unintended, visceral assessment of the feeling left behind. It is the reason that certain elements of the tableware are so important – the cutlery, the glassware – any product which the passenger physically holds. The design of such items should be an area of critical focus for airlines undertaking an overhaul of their serviceware.

Scent

We can also craft intentional sensory moments using scent. The amenity kit offers a unique opportunity to create olfactory experiences onboard, through careful selection of hand and face creams, and optionally the inclusion of a premium fragrance in the kit. The right products, offered in the right way, can create a unique sensory moment for passengers on their journey. A scent is something which remains in the memory, tied subconsciously to the physical experience. When a fragrance is a gifted item, that memory of a treasured experience can be reignited after the flight.

Taste

There is a reason that the dining service is the element which passengers judge as most integral to a positive experience onboard. It is the phase of the flight where all of our senses are engaged, almost simultaneously. It is an experience which is full of multiple cumulative sensory moments.

We expect the food before we see it, hopefully because we smell some alluring aromas stemming from the galley. Subsequently, the well-known trope that we eat with our eyes first rings true – what we see in terms of tableware and the food itself is a critical sensory moment. And then finally, of course, taste. To compound the positive experiences of the aromas and the meal presentation, that food has to then taste amazing. When it does, that is a home-run as far as cumulative sensory moments go.

Design with Intent

As airlines seek to elevate the Passenger Experience onboard in a highly competitive industry landscape; designers and decision-makers should work with great awareness of the emotion-driven perceptions of passengers, which are fuelled by cumulative sensory moments.