How customers can help prevent the closure of their airport.

Background

On February 21st 2014, security personnel on Frankfurt Airport striked. The trade Union Ver.di called on 5,000 security staff to stop handling 150,000 passengers on a typical (busy) Friday. According to news reports, 50 flights were cancelled, many delayed, and shortly after lunch the airport stopped admitting any new passengers altogether.

Not all information on how the strike has been managed by Fraport is public, but in general one can say that ‘keeping order’ is crucial in keeping the system running. Too much anxiety creates stress, raises body temperature and frustration, and triggers a self-supporting spiral that diminishes the tendency to abide by civil rules with the waiting passengers and the whole carefully designed system of waiting queues disintegrates by turning passengers into an unruly mob. When that happens, even additional relief measures like 110 Ver-di members interrupting their strike could not alleviate the situation any more and the only sensible alternative remaining was to close down parts of the system, as happened at Fraport.

In general, West European passengers are quite amenable to stand in line if required. Whenever the situation deteriorates due to anxiety and physical discomfort, the system will break down, however. And that is exactly what happened at Fraport. The first lady to jump line (approx 7:45 am) ostantatiously shrugged her shoulders when fellow “queuee’s” reproached her on the impropriety of her action. Soon, (7:55 am) her example was followed by a couple who jumped line only about 15 people ahead of them. A fairly ineffective if not to say ‘stupid’ move since it only saved them 10 minutes and made them the ridicule of their immediate surroundings, but apparently necessary to vent the couple’s frustration. A little later a whole group decided to skip some of the queue, which nearly led to a physical rather than a verbal interchange. The tone had been set.

Management

Fraport policy on the strike has been to maintain as much radio silence as possible and limit publicity. The Airport-FRA Twitter-team, 13 individuals strong – has announced the strike in 2 tweets (both in German and in English) on feb 20, but has tweeted on Feb 21 effectively only 4 times, mainly asking for attention of press releases (+3 times in English separately). When looking at the Twitter account nowadays – or the website – little evidence of the strike remains. That could be seen as a success, but it also shows that Fraport has not taken advantage of the crisis.

One obvious strategy could have been to further promote the Fraport app by providing the latest updates there. A bolder, innovative strategy would have been to use the crowd in maintaining order. Passengers are very willing to express their moral judgment to people jumping line and supporting civic behavior, but they are incapable of really ‘doing’ anything against it. This incapacity to perform an action turns into frustration and fuels the negative spiral. The airport authority could turn that around by requesting passengers to make a picture with their mobile phones when people jump line and post them on their Twitter account with a specified hashtag. Regular security personnel can then react, and escort the line-jumpers to their original places, or to the exit.

Yours truly has taken pictures of the first line jumpers on Feb 21 and posted them on Twitter the day of this post, as a kind of ‘Proof of Concept’. Though not a fan of ‘naming and shaming’ it may be clear that in the unlikely case anybody would like to use these pictures, I will refrain from copyrights on the material…

Some further thoughts

• In case of privacy concerns, and definitely when first using such a system, the pictures could be sent to an e-mail-account.
• That the naming of the account would funnel emotions towards the party responsible for the strike (e.g. #verdiFRA) is a detail that would help channel the emotional anger for passengers a little, although that would not work in case of bad weather of course.
• In an improved variation, images from a closed-circuit surveillance camera system could be used to verify assertions of line-jumping, and management could consider playing them back on closed-circuit displays in the waiting line halls to inform other passengers and deter future line-jumpers.

Obviously, this same strategy could be used in other public areas like for instance sport arena’s, pop concerts and amusement parks. By using public vigilance in such an emergency, the negative customer energy can be turned around into a positive co-creation one, serving not only the individual customer’s needs, but also decreasing the negative impact of queues in general.

 (Originally posted on February 27, 2014)