MAG-O in Stockholm


Last month several MAG-O colleagues attended the 2018 Passenger Terminal Conference in sunny Stockholm in order to learn more about the latest innovations in Airport Retail, Digital Tech and Product Development.

Chris Stone and Dan Glenn shared their conference takeaways.

Chris Stone, Trading and Merchandise manager, Product Development team

I went to the conference in order to find out about new trends in airport retail and how other airports have adapted their products and customer experiences appropriately.

Many of the issues discussed were those that MAG-O has been set up to address for MAG, such as the decline in airport retail penetration. This is a result of more low-cost flights, that have changed the purpose of airport visits exclusively to travel (purely getting from A to B), rather than as leisure and shopping destinations.

It was extremely interesting to see how other businesses are addressing the same challenges we are facing, such as the increasing use of digital to meet the demands of millennials and other future generations.

I was especially impressed by the Heathrow App, which has now integrated all shopping, food pre-ordering and customer loyalty functionalities into one platform. At MAG-O our aim is ultimately to bring this sort of development in-house, but it is extremely useful to see examples of similar work.

Another take-away for me was seeing the impact of combining new digital capabilities with more traditional, physical marketing as demonstrated by Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport. It may sound a bit basic, but if people aren’t made aware of the new digital options available to them – they won’t use them! And you can’t argue with DFW’s results…  


Dan Glenn, Lead Architect, Digital Technology

For me, the conference was an opportunity to gain an insight into the aviation industry and find out what sort of hot topics people are talking about at the moment. The sheer size of the event was very impressive.  I still can’t believe just how many gate & scanner suppliers there are in the world!

It’s amazing to see how forward thinking and innovative some airports are already in the digital space. Finavia, for example, spoke about a fascinating zero-risk, proof-of-concept on facial recognition to improve passenger experience in their airport.

It was also very validating to hear the majority of other airport speakers talk about their own roadmaps of API driven architecture – an approach we are taking at MAG-O.  Having API based access to data and services enables many things, such as allowing our engineering team to solve business problems fast and opening up conversations with external business partners about MAG-O’s digital capabilities.

However, I was slightly surprised at the under-representation of non-aviation revenues such as car-parking, that we manage and operate at MAG-O. I believe that this gap, coupled with our successes last year (which have provided us with a solid base on which to deliver quality products quickly) means that MAG-O is currently in an excellent position to become industry leaders in digital airport services.

Through this financial year, I intend to more clearly define the innovation function at MAG-O. Watch this space!







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