The ideal airport lounge experience
By Steve Brockway Maru/Matchbox | June 2023
Air travel has had its challenges over the last three years; airlines and airports need to entice their frequent flyers back to drive both volume and profitability, and one of the ways of doing this is through the airport lounge experience to ensure traveling is a pleasurable experience for premium and frequent flyers.
Airlines can differentiate their offer through their airport lounges. It is a crucial touchpoint on the journey providing an opportunity to drive loyalty through the brand experience.
We utilized the Maru experience and insights platform to instantly access recent air travelers who have used the airport or airline lounges during their journey. We compiled five themes from stated attitudes on what is required for the ideal airport lounge experience.
Food and drink
People are looking for quality, healthy food with a good choice of complimentary hot/cold food and drink. Many are focused on the quality and selection of food, which is always a challenge during peak times—additional emphasis on the quality of ingredients and food preparation with various healthy options.Comfortable physical space
Clean available seating that is comfortable and relaxing with private and public options. Temperature plays an essential role because it dramatically affects the feel of the lounge space.Ambiance
Many are seeking a peaceful, relaxing, and calm atmosphere. The ‘Ambience’ is less about physical things, rather more about feeling you are in a quiet space. Noise pollution significantly affects this factor.Service
Friendly, helpful, and welcoming service that is attentive and maintains service standards. The service theme was primarily focused on two areas, warm greetings and maintenance of food and service. A friendly greeting, which is sometimes underestimated by airlines as the entrance desk to the lounge might be the only interaction the traveler has with a person. The role of staff is a vital brand touchpoint.Connected
Staying connected with fast, free, accessible Wi-Fi and charging ports for all devices. This is an excellent example of an essential hygiene factor – get it right, and no one notices, but get it wrong, and you don't get permission to go beyond this and delight in other aspects.
Four key takeaways when researching how to improve airport lounge experiences.
When assessing a customer’s experience, it’s important to go further than collecting stated attitudes and post rationalized feedback. Doing so will only collect the obvious answers and not reveal the full picture of how to improve your experience. Understanding the emotions in the airport experience can provide more specific solutions to improving the customer experience.
Capturing response time from surveys unlocks new insights and more data points. You can determine which answers have a stronger emotional connection if the response was fast and implicit or a lower emotional connection if the response was slow and explicit. While rational aspects such as ‘clean and tidy’ are important, they do not make as strong of an emotional connection as creating an environment that promotes relaxation, calmness, and exclusivity.
Discover the meaning behind emotions; for example, people's rational description of 'Relaxing' can have the emotional meaning of creating a space where you feel better about yourself, which is an escape from the busy world outside. Maru’s Emotional Signature insights reveal white space opportunities to deliver unmet emotional needs through the lounge experience.
Finding the emotional sweet spot; this is the ideal emotional outcome or customer experience. Having a tool that can deliver these insights will enable Development teams who test benefits and propositions to prioritize and provide operational and marketing initiatives that matter the most to travelers.
Emotion adds insight.
Understanding how people feel and what they think rationally opens a whole new dimension of knowledge. It is not enough to collect stated attitudes and one-dimensional post-rationalized scores – think of it as looking into a room through a keyhole rather than being able to open the door and see the whole picture.
Knowing how people humanize their experiences inspires action in a way that scores alone simply cannot. Understanding people's feelings allows organizations to transform research findings into actions that build and strengthen relationships. This valuable understanding comes from adding how people feel to the classic measures of how people think and behave.
Read the whitepaper
Understanding emotion unlocks powerful new insight for marketers seeking to deliver premium experiences: A case study on premium airport and airline lounges.