Passenger research and advisory group, DKMA, is broadening its airport ASQ Retail survey to include two new components – and it is also renaming it as the Airport Consumer Survey (ACS).

 

ACS – which will interview more than 30,000 passengers in gate areas of airports this year – benchmarks the commercial offer of gateways and, this year, two new modules are being added: focusing on airport parking and marketing effectiveness. These join the existing four modules on passenger segmentation, airport F&B, duty paid, and duty free retail.

DKMA says that the research will also be transitioning to tablets for data collection, which, it claims, gives airports a greater freedom in tailoring the content of the research and speeds up data processing and reporting.

“With these changes we aim to provide airport managers with a single tool to monitor their performance for each of the main sources of non-aeronautical revenue and systematically grow sales,” says Damien Kobel, Managing Director at DKMA.

Kobel adds that airports will now be able to identify key consumer segments, see which communication channels are most effective at reaching them, and also understand what drives their satisfaction and spending as well as find ways to cross-sell between categories.

DEEPER DEMOGRAPHIC PROFILING

The 2015 ACS delves deeper into segmentation, with shoppers and non-shoppers identified according to their demographic profile. Shop specific data is also being “taken to a new level” claims DKMA enabling airports to drill down and analyse performance at individual outlets.

“Commercial managers will be able to break their sales process down into individual steps, see exactly where they are losing sales and put their performance into context by benchmarking key commercial KPIs with leading airports around the world,” says DKMA.

“Our research has shown that passengers who are most satisfied with the commercial experience spend +10% more time at the airport, are twice as likely to shop and spend more on average (+7% more on duty paid and +20% more on duty free),” says Kobel.