Go-up! – Iberia’s Project to Transform its Airport Handling Business
At Iberia we are immersed in a project we have called Go-up! It encompasses all the innovation initiatives we are implementing at the 29 airports where we provide handling services to more than 200 customer airlines.
Go-up! is innovation and future, an exciting project that Iberia Airport Services is implementing with the drive and energy of all the team.
We launched Go-up! with four objectives:
- To increase our efficiency, reviewing all our procedures from the bottom up, and using technology to simplify them and achieve greater profitability
- To modify our marketing management and our portfolio of services, to enable us to explore new business opportunities
- To improve customer experience in all the airports in our network, particularly in Madrid and Barcelona, where our biggest customers, Iberia and Vueling, have their hubs
- To launch new working methods that improve the day-to-day work of our employees, providing them with new tools allowing them to operate more flexibly, simply, and efficiently, while simultaneously helping to drive cultural change across our entire team
To achieve these objectives we are launching more than 200 initiatives in four areas: digitalisation, business development, customer experience, and employee engagement.
Digitalisation
This year will witness the digital take-off of Iberia Airport Services, in keeping with the digital transformation that is taking place throughout the Iberia Group. The digitalisation of our business in focused on:
- Improving operations management with new tools, including one for real-time planning, management, and assigning of resources, which will be accessible from all our employees’ mobile devices.
- Transformation of ramp operations, applying existing solutions to operational processes and also incorporating the more advanced options being explored by the industry related to ground equipment, improving working conditions, and increasing workplace safety.
- We are taking advantage of geolocation technology and also advancing in the use of alternative energies for our ground equipment, and electric-powered vehicles already account for some 40% of the total.
- Transformation of terminal operations, implementing new customer assistance procedures; developing airport infrastructure by incorporating “self” modes; optimising passenger and luggage connection processes; improving connectivity via the use of tracing tools; improving coordination between airport, airline, and handling operator; and updating incident response procedures.
Business Development and Customer Experience at our Hubs
In the area of commercial management of airline customers, our objective is to design genuine custom-tailored solutions, meeting the particular needs of each client, using technology and mobility, and highlighting the flexibility that is in the DNA of Iberia Airport Services.
We are also working to make the airport a friendlier environment for our customers, in which they can make any request, ask for any information, or contract any service, in the simplest possible manner, for a genuinely seamless customer experience.
Some examples of the improvements we are working on include door-to-door luggage management – now being tested in the Madrid airport–, the possibility of acquiring additional services for a flight from any point in the airport, and the development of an app that enables passengers to trace the location of their luggage or pets in real-time, while also improving services to unaccompanied minors.
Engagement
People are one of the pillars of our Go-up! project, which also contains cultural change initiatives. After having updated the uniforms for ramp employees, we are proceeding to change the uniforms of passenger service and coordination ground staff, with new ones being designed by Teresa Helbig, which will give us a new image for a new era in our airports.
Many of the Go up! initiatives are intended to improve the working tools of our employees, in order to facilitate their daily work and to increase their level of engagement.
Go-up! is innovation and future, an exciting project that Iberia Airport Services is implementing with the drive and energy of a team that works every day as if it were the first day.
