Athens International Airport uses AI to measure passenger emotions

By ELIZABETH BAKER I passengerterminaltoday

Athens International Airport (AIA) in Greece has launched its Measuring Passengers’ Emotional Engagement initiative, using artificial intelligence (AI) to measure passengers’ stress and emotions in the wake of the pandemic.

Measuring Passengers’ Emotional Engagement: Your Emotions Count is a tool that enables airports to measure emotional engagement by analyzing the data from their existing communication channels. These include call centers, social media, comment management and customer care. In collaboration with PathosAI, a Canadian tech company, the airport will use unstructured passenger-generated digital data,  AI and natural language processing (NLP) to better understand the subconscious drivers of the passenger experience. The use of AI, NLP and other digital tools is intended to help the airport replace traditional pen and paper and high-touch methods with engagement performance metrics and specific action areas to improve the passenger experience.

Emotional Engagement helps airports understand what is driving passengers’ emotions and therefore plan better experiences that increase consumer spending. The tool was designed to operate under ACI Europe’s sustainability principles, i.e. placing travelers in the heart of every airport and enhancing their experience by investing in the three elements that form passenger experience: people, processes and premises.

Ioanna Papadopoulou, Athens International Airport’s communications and marketing director, stated, “People are the centerpiece of all our actions. Aiming at creating the optimum environment for our passengers, especially during these unprecedented times, we have embarked on this pilot project in collaboration with PathosAI. Through AI and state-of-the-art digital tools, we measure and identify stress levels, emotions and subconscious drivers of passenger experience in an effort to pinpoint specific action areas and become better.”

Athens Airport recently won the ACI Europe Best Airport award in its category (annual traffic 25-40 million passengers, according to 2019 levels). In response, Sumair Sayani, the founder of PathosAI, said, “Congratulations to Athens International Airport for winning the prestigious ACI Europe Best Airport award 2021! It is a proud moment for us to support AIA in its pioneering work. It has long been a challenge for consumer-facing organizations, including airports, to understand how interactions impact emotion. With PathosAI, AIA unearthed its passengers’ emotions, their true motivations and the context, allowing, for the first time, the measurement of passenger emotional engagement. This enabled us to design specific action areas to maximize passenger satisfaction. AIA has established a highly effective real-time measurement and monitoring CX platform that will support the design and implementation of its award-winning customer experience strategy, and we are excited to be part of this journey.”