When extreme weather strikes - airport operations feel the impact. Flights get delayed or cancelled, and departures reshuffled, leaving passengers stressed and staff under pressure to keep everything running smoothly.
For customer service teams, these types of days can bring a nonstop stream of questions, with conditions changing by the minute. Even under all this pressure, they’re still expected to deliver the same calm, high-quality experiences as they would on regular days.
To help combat these challenges, more forward-thinking airports are turning to AI-powered Digital team members to play a central role in removing demands on hard-stretched teams not just during extreme weather, but all year round.
When extreme weather hits, airport staff tend to be the first touchpoint passengers turn to with their questions and frustrations. These sudden disruptions make travellers feel like they’ve lost control of their journey, quickly leading to a spike in queries and extended queues at customer service desks with the reliance on staff to provide information.
For these airport teams, they’ll often hear some of these same panicked questions being asked time and time again:
❓ “When will the airport reopen?”
❓“How do I rebook my flight?”
❓“Where is the nearest hotel?”
For the busiest international hubs, it’s not a case of these questions being asked once or twice - it’s thousands of times in a day. And with this, comes a huge workload for customer service teams, pulling them away from other important responsibilities where human interaction is required.
At Birmingham Airport (BHX), this situation arose when a spell of snow swept across the city in early-January due to Storm Goretti, leading to the closure of the airport and flight suspensions. To better manage heightened periods of stress, BHX Airport introduced Hello Airport, an in-terminal Digital team member to alleviate pressure on already-stretched teams.
For BHX Airport, Hello Airport helped manage a 500% increase in incoming passenger queries during the storm and deflected this from staff by providing instant, accurate information on flight statuses, delays and questions to travellers across multiple digital touchpoints in the airport terminal.
With more than 6,700 questions asked during Storm Goretti (8th - 10th January), over 1300 hours of staff time was saved by Hello Airport handling those queries. To put that into perspective, that’s the equivalent of 54 working days — or 7.7 weeks that would otherwise have been spent answering passenger questions, delivering a clear and measurable return on investment for BHX Airport compared to other engagement methods.
Here’s just some of the wide array of questions passengers asked during Storm Goretti — all of which were handled by our in-terminal Digital team members:
❓“Why are flights being diverted?”
❓“Has the airport closed to arrivals?”
❓“How do I extend my parking reservation due to my flight being cancelled?”
❓“Can I be compensated for my delayed flight?”
❓“My flight is delayed until tomorrow, can I sleep in the airport?”
No matter how bad the weather gets outside, Birmingham still has a reliable way to keep passengers informed. It means when staff are unable to make it to the airport themselves, the pressure is taken off the rest of the team - as those routine questions are handled by our Digital team member, allowing frontline staff to focus on what really needs their attention.
Bad weather is always going to be inevitable - but the disruption it causes doesn’t have to be. More can be done within airports to better handle these unexpected changes when they arise. The key? It’s all about ease of access. If passengers have the ability to get the answers they need straight from their phones, it reduces the strain on customer service and operational staff leading to more availability for airport teams to focus on those situations that really do require in-person support.
