Easily make your next flight

You’re finally taking that trip you’ve been looking forward to for so long. The first part of the trip went well: your trip to the airport was uneventful and you got from check-in to the gate just fine. Boarding got underway with a slight delay and you’re ready to fly to your next stopover destination. Just one more transfer before you arrive at your holiday destination.

During the flight you start to worry the delay will make it difficult for you to catch your connecting flight. That means you’ll have to hustle. What’s more, you don’t know where to go at the airport. Do you need to pick up your bags first? Oh no, there may be a long queue at border control. Will you make your connection?

Transfer passengers

Sound familiar? Same here. At Brussels Airport 18% of all passengers are transfer passengers. Considering the fact that our airport accommodates 25.7 million travellers a year that’s quite a lot. Every day we see people hurrying to make their flight so we thought it was high time to do something about it. With our new transfer matrix we can predict with great accuracy who will make their connection and who is heading for trouble.

Prediction and follow-up

The new transfer matrix was the first module to go live within the Airport Operations Plan (AOP), a plan that helps us improve the daily operations of our airport through the use of data. These data give us accurate insights into our passengers and the time the various flights will land or leave the airport. For instance, we can see exactly when passengers will be landing at Brussels Airport. Moreover, we know exactly which passengers have to catch a connecting flight and how long it will take them to get from their arrival gate to their connecting gate. The AOP also monitors the waiting times at security screening and border control so we can estimate more accurately how long their journey through the airport will take.

But there’s more. The AOP not only monitors the current waiting times but the accumulated data also help us predict future waiting times. This information enables us to make a precise estimate of how long our transfer passengers will need to get to their connecting flight, even though they haven’t even landed in Brussels yet.

A helping hand

As soon as we see that passengers will have difficulty making their connection we start looking for solutions to get those passengers into their seats on time. When passengers have no chance of catching their connecting flight we provide the airline with accurate information so they can proactively rebook the passengers’ tickets. This way they can offer them a viable alternative as soon as they land. Not only does this alleviate the stress of our passengers, it also results in shorter delays of (connecting) flights. Isn’t that a bonus?