Customer Understanding for Airport Customer Experience: Theory vs Practice

One of the (many!) interesting things about working in airport customer experience for as long as our team has, is watching how the language around customer experience changes as ideas about how to centralize passenger needs and expectations evolve. Trade association Airports Council International (ACI), recently identified “customer understanding” as “the first pillar of airport experience management.” ACI talks about leveraging “experience sensors,” and theorizes about “listening architecture.” Language like this marks a move from a purely transactional approach to customer feedback towards a more integrated approach to engaged customer listening. The implications for airport experience strategy and design are significant.

It is important for an organization like ACI to lead conversations that elevate the customer experience discipline. Mindsets that focus on understanding the customer are important. However, identifying customer understanding as a metric for successful customer experience is not enough. It cannot, independent of building and investing in customer experience infrastructure, materially improve the daily experiences of the customers our airports serve around the world.

Translating the theory of customer understanding to practical airport customer experience improvements, requires more than promises and plans around how we think about the customer. Achieving true customer understanding, and leveraging it for customer experience impact, requires access to the funding and authority necessary to operationalize customer experience. Then, and only then, will airports make experience improvements come to life.

The Aspiration vs Action Gap

So let’s take a look at what ACI is saying about airport customer experience, along with what is practically necessary – and practically possible – to achieve outcomes that meet ACI criteria for passenger experience quality.

Through our practitioner lens, The Petrova Experience team recognizes that the ACI framework articulates what airports should achieve. That is an important first step. What it does not do as explicitly, is address the costs it takes to get there. Again, from our point of view as passenger experience designers, that equates to ACI setting an aspiration for airports who want to deliver on customer experience promises. But there is a real, and arguably widening, gap between that aspiration and the path to actualization.

If ACI calls for “customer understanding,” airports need to know (and be in a position to deliver on) what meaningful customer understanding actually costs. What are the funding requirements? What type of organizational design supports customer understanding? And how, with the limited resources at an airport’s disposal, do they align organizational structure, passenger experience design, and capital projects around the goal of delivering experiences powered by customer understanding. Beyond the theoretical.

This gap between aspiration and feasibility is a central challenge for airport executives. We have seen this in our work at airports of all sizes, and in different regions. Sourcing a CX survey vendor is not enough. Centralizing ownership of airport customer experience and empowering owners of customer experience to influence design, funding, and operations helps fill the gap. And sustained investment makes the aspirational feasible.

Today, we are diving into the real practice behind these ideas, including what is missing in infrastructure, why airports cannot delegate customer understanding downward, and how to address experience fragmentation. Within this context, we are looking at how organizational design, frontline capability, and capital‑project governance shape customer experience quality.

At the end of the day, while airports are uniquely complex operational environments, as we know better than most, airports are also like organizations across industries when it comes to customer experience infrastructure. Namely, operational excellence in customer experience begins with executive‑level decisions around funding and accountability.

Talking About Experience vs Designing Experience

ACI’s language around customer understanding reflects a growing recognition that customer experience is an essential strategic capability. ACI positions customer understanding as the output of a triangulated system that includes customer feedback, qualitative observation, and employee insight. Experience sensors, the term ACI uses, elevates frontline employees as critical sources of early detection of customer experience issues. The term listening architecture, as ACI applies it, reframes feedback collection as an integrated experience infrastructure.

These are good points! As we share with our airport and transportation clients, and in our articles, customer experience is a system; it is not a survey. With that in mind, we need to look clearly at the ACI language and the new responsibility it places on airports. If airports adopt ACI’s lexicon without adopting the organizational structures required to support it, they risk creating a rhetorical veneer of customer experience maturity without the operational structure to deliver experiences that reflect CX maturity.

Associations like ACI for airports and CXPA across industries help educate organizations on concepts relating to the value of customer experience. The challenge of staying at the level of conceptual theory is that it becomes difficult to make real and sustainable changes, even if organizations buy into the theory. Simply put, thanks to ACI, airports know what they should do (especially when they want to improve their ASQ scores). They do not know how to make the necessary internal changes to do what they need to do to make that a reality.

What lives in the gap between ACI’s call to achieve customer understanding and the practice of achieving it? For one, the very real political sensitivity of centralizing customer experience authority. Also, the cost of building and maintaining robust customer research capability. And the organizational investment necessary to enforce defined customer experience standards across an airport campus in capital projects and ongoing operations.

Achieving real customer understanding and its attendant customer experience improvements, requires real funding, centralized customer experience authority (e.g., a single, unified team responsible for all feedback collection, as opposed to a patchwork of disparate vendors), and an organizational structure that seats customer experience executives at the table where airport-wide planning and operations decisions are made.

Why Customer Experience Cannot Sit Four Levels Down

In many airports, customer experience sits too low in the organizational hierarchy, making it impossible to influence strategy, operations, and capital projects in a meaningful way. Customer experience might sit under the Chief Commercial Officer, reporting through an SVP of Customer or Terminal Experience, with a manager leading a small team of – maybe three – employees. In this type of structure, we see a manager who often is responsible for surveys, frontline programs, vendor oversight, and issue reporting. But that manager lacks the authority to enforce standards. And the budget to build a unified system.

Such a structure reflects an all too common (and increasingly outmoded) view of customer experience as a soft function. That nice-to-have hospitality layer. What customer experience actually is, and how airports must recognize it to achieve goals laid out by ACI, is an operational discipline. Customer experience must be elevated to a strategic function with political power, budgetary control, and cross‑departmental authority.

In that vein, executives must ask themselves the following, and be accountable for the answers:

• Who owns customer understanding in our airport?
• Does that team have the authority to standardize feedback collection across vendors?
• Can they influence decisions on capital projects before architectural plans are finalized?
• Do they have the budget to build a unified customer feedback system aligned with a consistent customer experience strategy?
• Are they empowered to enforce operational changes based on real customer insights?

If the answer to any of these questions is no, customer understanding is not structurally possible.

It is time to elevate customer experience inside the organizational structure of airports. That means elevating roles and reporting lines. And securing executive‑level sponsorship. Without that, airports are stuck in the space of aspiration and theory, and hamstrung in practice.

Understanding Employees as Experience Assets

ACI’s term experience sensors is powerful. It acknowledges frontline employees as critical sources of customer insight. But airports’ current implementation of frontline reporting needs to improve.

Many airports rely on retiree volunteers and low‑wage workers, some who have limited English proficiency or are under-skilled in technology. These employees and volunteers are expected to interface with insights collection technology in real time via handheld devices, while they are interacting with, and aiming to support, customers who are often in high-anxiety moments on their airport experience journey.

What we see in the field is that the interfaces on the devices frequently require multi‑layered dropdown navigation without geolocation support. Multiple, complex, manual inputs that are not intuitive pose a challenge even to a savvy user. The burden is excessive, and the return poor, for most frontline employees who lack training on how to navigate the interface smoothly. Technology teams frequently design these tools without observing the actual frontline workflow. That leads to systems that, while theoretically elegant, are practically unusable.

As such, this is a design problem. For airports to solve that problem, it is time to address frontline reporting as a product design challenge. To that end, they should ask the following, in keeping with the ACI terminology of employee sensor:

• Who are our employee sensors?
• What qualifications does the employee sensor role require?
• How do we train and compensate our employees appropriately?
• How do we design tools that match real workflow?
• How do we ensure data quality at scale?

Airports cannot build customer understanding on undertrained labor using poorly designed tools. Instead, airports must invest in frontline capability and redesign reporting systems based on real user observation. They need to treat employee sensors as skilled contributors to a strategic function. And ambassadors of exceptional customer experience.

Customer Understanding has Impact When It is Part of Capital Projects

Airports operate in two parallel worlds: operations and infrastructure. Operations manages the day‑to‑day passenger experience. Infrastructure builds the physical environment. These worlds rarely interact meaningfully, to the detriment of airport customer experience.

New terminals are often designed without input from the experts who understand passenger personas, frontline workflows, and operational constraints. By the time operations is consulted, the design is already locked.

Case in point, underground Wi‑Fi for baggage‑handling devices was omitted from a major terminal project because the thinking was, “no customer needs it there.” In this scenario, the design team failed to recognize that baggage‑handling staff are an essential part of the customer experience ecosystem. And their tools require connectivity. As a result, modern Wi‑Fi‑dependent systems were retrofitted poorly or not at all. That means higher cost for lower performance.

This scenario is a governance failure. Customer understanding must be embedded in capital‑project decision‑making, by customer experience leaders who have authority to influence design requirements, operational workflows, and technology infrastructure before construction begins. That means customer experience executive presence in the airport org structure and building customer experience into RFPs for capital projects.

The Lack of Ownership Problem

Let’s look at two examples of what happens when there is lack of ownership of customer experience. In one airport, a large research team conducts daily intercept surveys, annual studies, and focus groups. They manage multiple vendors and collect significant data. But internal ownership is unclear. As a result, the breadth of data does not translate into a unified narrative or actionable insight. It becomes data for the sake of data.

In another airport, feedback sources are fragmented across more than twenty disconnected systems. Think, restroom kiosks, Wi‑Fi surveys, TSA data. But there is no unified customer experience strategy. The tools exist, but the cohesive system does not.

Both cases demonstrate the same reality: without a unified, strategically aligned team responsible for collecting, integrating, and interpreting feedback, airports cannot build a coherent picture of the passenger experience. Without that coherent picture, they cannot make meaningful improvements to customer experience.

How Airport Executives Can Achieve Real Customer Experience Impact

Airport executives must recognize that customer understanding is a strategic capability that requires the following:

• Funding Investment in research, tools, frontline training, and unified systems.
• Centralization One team responsible for all feedback, insight, and narrative.
• Organizational Authority A reporting line with authority to influence operations and capital projects.
• Frontline Capability Well-trained employees equipped with tools designed to support their real workflow.
• Cross‑Functional Integration Formal influence over infrastructure decisions before construction begins.

Without these elements, customer understanding remains theoretical. With them, airports can maximize customer experience as an operational discipline.

Airports that put this approach into practice will emerge as leaders (and improve ASQ scores). Airports that ignore it will continue to build terminals that look modern but underperform on customer experience promises. Are you ready to put the theory into practice?