Customer service complaints, wasted hours, and extremely uncomfortable seats: Frequent and occasional flyers alike have a lot of problems with the status quo of air travel.
One of the worst examples of a frustratingly behind-the-times industry is New York"™s La Guardia airport, a fixture of U.S. air travel since its official opening in 1953. La Guardia"™s recently announced redesign may make accessibility easier and security faster, but widening existing bottlenecks in an inferior process may not be enough to keep up with the current progress in airport design. So what does the ideal airport of the future look like? It"™s more complicated than a rudimentary set of improvements. Airports of the future may see changes not just in security procedures and technology, but in purpose within the communities they serve.
"Airports want to become a destination," says Schulz. "They want to see people travel out to the airports to go shopping, and we"™re seeing that internationally.»
Let"™s be clear: the United States has some awful airports, and La Guardia is consistently complained about. Lionel Ohayon, CEO and founder of the design group ICrave says that America has considerably worse airports because we"™ve had airports longer than many other counties, and the age is showing in our designs. "We kind of have the worst airports in the world because we went through this 85 years ago when everyone was building airports in America. And now you have places where all this new stuff is happening."
With that in mind, we asked experts in airport design and infrastructure where the future of air travel lies, and they saw an entirely redesigned user experience, and pointed to several key factors in making airports financially independent, user friendly, and reliably efficient.
"When we look to the passenger airport of the future, you kind of have to look at the passenger and the technology that will be made available," says TJ Schulz, president of the Airport Consultants Council, a consulting firm for private businesses that have a stake in airport development. "I think what we"™re going to see are attempts to really facilitate and automate the passenger processing experience.» He thinks getting through the checkpoint and check-in desks could be a thing of the past as self-serving kiosks can easily take their place…
