There is no doubt that the Covid pandemic has had a profound impact on the airline industry. Cancelled flights and changes to schedules have kept handling agents busy, taking care about complaints and process compliance. With staff shortages now commonplace, it is time to free handling agents from the repetitive task to do announcements and allow them to provide an even better customer experience.

1. The current state of boarding announcements

While many aspects of air travel have become more automated and streamlined in the recent years, one area that remains relatively unchanged is the way in which boarding announcements are made. Handling agents are still responsible for talking to the paging stations at the gates and informing passengers about the boarding procedure and general flight information. This can be a time-consuming process, particularly during busy periods, and it often results in incomprehensible announcements. This can be frustrating for passengers who are eager to board their flight and get on with their journey but do not receive the information they need in an understandable manner. Especially for passengers who are at the airport for the first time, this can cause stress and the entire passenger experience suffers.

2. Why it's time for a change

Manual boarding announcements create several problems:

• Quality
  Comprehensibility and consistent quality of the announcements is not given
• Background noise
  Especially in areas where several gates are located, different announcements can overlap and make the information incomprehensible
• Multilingualism
  Number of languages depending on the qualification of the staff
• Personnel Expenses/Effort
  Announcements must be recorded/triggered manually and sufficient information of passengers is not given

3. The benefits of making the switch to automatic announcements

Making the switch to automatic announcements can be a great way to streamline the boarding process and give handling agents the flexibility to take care about other tasks, like passenger complaints.

Here are some of the benefits of making the switch:

• Better comprehensibility
  Announcements generated in high quality are better for the passenger to understand and inform them precisely about the next steps.
• Order in chaos
  Automatic announcements are intelligently queued according to a complex business logic. This prevents announcements from breaking off, overlapping or being incomprehensible.
• Get everyone on board
  Automatic announcements can be issued in more than just one language. The PAXGuide system from Sittig, for example, offers announcements in over 40 languages. This means that you can specifically reach foreign-language passengers.
• Enhancing the customer service
  Handling agents usually need about 3-5 minutes per flight to perform announcements… in just one language. They can now use this time to take more care of the boarding process itself and passenger requests.

4. How to make the transition

Making the switch from manual to automatic announcements doesn't have to be difficult. With Sittig's PAXGuide system, you can use your existing PA and IT infrastructure to make the transition seamlessly. With its best-in-class interfaces to the leading PA system providers, PAXGuide software can precisely control existing systems. The PAXGuide system receives live data from your aodb/fids system and uses it to compile announcements with one of the best text-to-speech engines on the market. All airline specifics such as zone, boarding, group boarding, etc. are covered. You can choose to have all announcements made automatically or allow handling agents to trigger them at the gate PCs via the PAXgate web app. Either way, making the switch to automatic announcements is easy with Sittig.

We support you in the whole process and help you to implement a lean system tailored to your needs.

We hope that this article has convinced you that it's time for airports and airlines to move away from manual announcements. If you agree with us, please get in contact with us and let us know.