“Airports are places where people are nervous and anxious and you really don’t want to add to that,” comments Birch. Improving the ambience at terminals after Covid-19Īt the core of Quiet Airport was the idea that customers appreciate a less stressful airport environment. This equalled a 47% reduction in occurrences and a 60% cut to duration. “All three had their separate systems, all playing music so we also told them they could not have stereo systems at boarding gates.”Īchievements include reducing individual paging from 492 to 261 individual occurrences, whose cumulative duration went down from 145 minutes to 58 minutes. “At one point we had a situation where we had three carriers next to each other,” Birch says. “We provided some tips to the agents on making more effective announcements.”ĭecibel limits were also imposed in areas operated by SFO’s concessionaires, while passengers were encouraged to engage with airline apps, consult flight information screens or use the SFO text service to receive flight information updates. “For example, we used to remind people not to get in unauthorised cabs, but that is not really a problem any more thanks to Uber and Lyft, so we removed it.” “We pushed everything to the website and visual paging,” he continues. The airport then moved on to ban all automatic announcements apart from those made by the Transportation Security Administration and anything safety and security related. “In place of that, we provided some tips to the agents on making more effective announcements, such as enunciating, going slower and rehearsing the customer’s name before saying it on the PA.” “We physically unplugged ability to make boarding area-wide paging, we removed from the boarding and the paging systems at the gate,” explains Birch. Credit: San Francisco International Airport. San Francisco has banned all automatic announcements apart from those related to safety and security. “That was where we reduced by probably 40% or maybe 50%,” he says. With four terminals spanning across over 21,000km 2, SFO worked to create individual zones that allowed it to push pages out to relevant areas only. The bulk of the programme was reducing the frequency and duration of unnecessary and intrusive sound through a restructuring of the airport’s entire paging system. However, this gave the airport’s legacy airlines a chance to try different parts of the scheme without risking excessive disruptions. The fast spread of Covid-19 in the US gave SFO only a few weeks to test the programme with normal volumes before having to restrict traffic due to national lockdowns. Breaking down the ‘Quiet Airport’ programme The pilot’s success led to a broader, airport-wide rollout between December 2019 and March 2020. This led to a trial run with SFO’s main carrier United Airlines, which vowed to limit its public announcements to active gates and the gate adjacent to it. “In Europe and Asia, is somewhat common and some airports were really clear to say that we needed to make an infrastructure change in collaboration with our partners.” If you do not agree to the use of marketing cookies, ads will be displayed, but will not be tailored to your preferences.High noise levels were also coming from stereo systems at boarding gates, ticket and check-in counters, as well as automated features such as escalators and moving walkways – making SFO, as Birch puts it, the “Wild West in terms of sound”.īringing these volumes down became paramount for the airport, which decided looked across the ocean for inspiration. Advertising cookies do not record your personal information, but they idenatify your web browser and device. Your interest profile is created based on the information from the cookies. They can be installed by partners through our service. Marketing cookies allow you to tailor the ads displayed on and off our site to your interests. If you do not give permission for the use of these cookies, they will not collect and transmit data. They are not intended to determine the identity of users. The information collected is used to improve the quality and efficiency of our service. They allow us to learn how users of our store navigate, what they are looking for, and which pages appeal to them. Always enabledĪnalytical cookies are used for statistical and business analysis, as well as to constantly improve the performance of our site and services by enabling us to see the number of visits and traffic sources. They are installed mainly for remembering login sessions and filling out forms. They additionally guarantee the security of shopping. Essential cookies guarantee the correct operation of the site and all its technological functionalities related to the execution of the shopping process.
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