As mobile devices are increasingly part of our lives, whether or not airports provide wireless is increasingly becoming an expectation of connected mobile consumers. With all these passengers roaming through airports on their mobile devices, having an airport Wi-Fi network presents countless opportunities for airport business leaders to tap into location intelligence and analytics to optimize for planning layout, operations, and user-experience. One example could be using location analytics to differentiate the cost of advertising spaces in the terminal depending on how crowded a place is the billboard. And the shops and cafes are located in the terminal can not only track the number of visitors, but also to analyze the effectiveness of advertising. There are countless applications for the use of location analytics in the air travel industry, and Cisco along with our partner SITA are pioneering the way with Connected Mobile Experiences and Airport iFlow.

Having been at the Air Passenger Expo with SITA last week and following a series of customer discussions since then and in the weeks prior to the expo the awareness of location capabilities is ramping up very rapidly within the Airport/Airline industry.

• Airports are looking to deliver value added services and customer experiences to their travelers, while getting enhanced insight and information that can deliver both operational and marketing benefits
• Airlines are looking to also provide enhanced experiences to their passengers -enabling ease of movement, navigation, notification and alerts for gate changes etc..

Some of the emerging trends in this industry that are being reported support this evolution -these include.

• Utilizing  big data & business intelligence leverage capabilities and serve the increasing traveller demands.
• Travel and buying experiences will become more and more personalized as passengers seek greater control over information and processes.
• Growing of multi channel self service capabilities and using technology to enable multi channel human interaction also.
• The increasing dominance of Mobile  among travelers.

Location Analytics and the convergence of WiFi, Smartphones, Big Data and real-time analytics capabilities will make for a very interesting couple of years of Innovation within the industry.

For more on Cisco's location analytics solution, check out Connected Mobile Experiences.