Vision-Box has announced the launch of a comprehensive open services platform built upon biometrics for passenger flow management usable by airports, airlines and border authorities, aggregating valuable actionable intelligence tools for improved process monitoring and decision making.
LISBON, Portugal – One of the world’s largest gatherings of leading travel industry businesses, government representatives, and insider experts took place in Las Vegas’ Mandalay Bay Resort last week. More than 700 leaders in the travel industry have gathered to exhibit and explore the latest advancements in passenger experience at the Future Travel Experience Global 2016 Conference.
After last year’s recognition of Aruba Happy Flow, the first single biometric token airport experience, with the Best Immigration & Arrivals Initiative Award, a joint work including Aruba Airport Authority, the Aruba Government, Schiphol Group and KLM Royal Dutch Airlines, eyes are on Vision-Box, the company that successfully designed and made the industry-changing concept real, to see how far the “passenger’s favorite airport journey” has gone in improving the passengers’ experience.
In addition to presenting the key findings of over one year of successful operations of Aruba Happy Flow, Vision-Box unveiled yet another game-changer: underneath the well-known Happy Flow lies Orchestra, the intelligent passenger journey open services platform engine that is revolutionizing the relationship between passengers, the airport, airlines and border authorities. Orchestra makes an incredible amount of actionable information available through multi-stakeholder collaboration providing a clear path to optimizing operations and streamlining passenger flow. Unlocked by the single biometric token of Happy Flow, Orchestra brings the aviation industry to a rich collaborative ecosystem for realtime intelligence-driven airport management.
Enabling the digital airport and managing through business intelligence
With Orchestra, each stakeholder can define passenger workflows and rely on a catalog of published services to write their own relevant business rules. Based on biometric transactions motivated by the passenger at each sequential self-service touchpoints of Happy Flow – be it mobile, check-in kiosks, bag drop, security, border or boarding gates – high quality and real-time data on passenger identity is stored on a virtual Passenger Data Envelope.
Where are passengers spending their time at the airport? How delayed is a specific passenger? Has he crossed immigration yet? How much time are they spending in the retail area? These are just some of the questions that Orchestra is ready to answer.
Orchestra benefits from a set of Business Intelligence tools and allows for the definition of custom Business Rules whereby stakeholders can raise alarms and trigger actions based on information from various sources. For example, an airline may wish to define a rule to keep luggage on hold for a passenger who is severely delayed, allowing the airline to operate avoiding flight delays or to off-load baggage. Privacy by design ensures information is aggregated with the appropriate granularity not to disclose, for instance, whether the passenger has been retained at border control for questioning or there is a long queue at immigration. This ensures the airline knows where the passenger is in the process while safe-guarding the privacy of the passenger.
Similarly, an airport may wish to define a rule triggered by a large number of passengers checking in or crossing security access gates to automatically open more security lanes. Retailers and airlines may target customers according to their location and demographics to offer personalized services they have chosen to receive.
Pedro Torres, Director of Marketing explains: “These are fantastic times we are living in. Leveraging on the seamless passenger flow and the single biometric token, we have reached an absolute tipping point in the digital airport era. Airports, airlines and governments have now an open services platform at their disposal where they can collaborate and create real time business rules about passenger flow to both optimize their operations and improve security. All this, without compromising a millimeter on the privacy and security of information they share with other stakeholders in the ecosystem. It’s indeed the best of both worlds – cooperation and competition. Happy Flow and Orchestra are a must for airports and airlines at the forefront of passenger innovation and we are now witnessing the first big wave of market uptake in major international airports”.
Key takeaways from Future Travel Experience Global
Throughout the week, Vision-Box has exhibited at FTE Global and was awarded the Best Exhibition Stand of the event at the 2016 FTE Awards Gala. A true end-to-end passenger journey was showcased, including the latest touch-points for passenger interaction, from mobile, through kiosks and eGates. Vision-Box also presented how Orchestra plays a fundamental role in instituting a trusted and reliable crossstakeholder collaborative environment. In particular, how such versatile platform can provide biometric Entry and Exit Systems that gives border authorities powerful tools to collect real-time information and enhance the security from the moment passengers arrive into the country to the moment they leave. And this is just the beginning.
Angelos is the news editor for TravelDailyNews Media Network (traveldailynews.gr, traveldailynews.com and traveldailynews.asia). His role includes to monitor the hundrends of news sources of TravelDailyNews Media Network and skim the most important according to our strategy. He currently studies Communication, Media & Culture in Panteion University of Political & Social Studies of Athens.
