Redesigning the deboarding experience

Redesigning the deboarding experience

Spaargaren, Claudia (TU Delft Industrial Design Engineering)

Vink, Peter (mentor)
Dehli, Silje (mentor)
Buys, Yorick (mentor)

Delft University of Technology

Design for Interaction

2018-11-08

You are almost at your holiday destination. The ‘fasten your seatbelt’ sign just turned on and the plane started descending. After landing it is time to get out of this confined space, but all the other passengers are thinking the same thing. Everyone stands in the aisle, trying to get their hand luggage out of the overhead bin and exit the plane at the same time. Arriving at the gate you feel relieved you are out and can really start your holiday. The deboarding experience is not the best experience of flying. And seeing it from the perspective of the airline, the delays caused by this process are increasing. To investigate this issue a project was executed at Brussels Airlines. A research observing the deboarding of 28 flights showed the causes for blocks in the passenger flow going out of the plane. Four out of five are related to the hand luggage people bring. An A-B test with 16 passengers shows taking away the trolleys can save up to 80% of the deboarding time. Therefore, five concepts are proposed to make the deboarding smoother by changing the behaviour of people regarding hand luggage. The proposed concepts vary from informing people about the process of deboarding, having a new boarding & deboarding strategy based on the luggage people bring, convince people to bring less hand luggage giving direct feedback on their luggage at the airport, setting up a sharing community at every destination and the last concept focusses on educating people about the consequences of hand luggage in a game. The last concept is delivered as a final concept and explained more detailed. The concept called ‘The luggage games’ is a smartphone application passengers can play before they fly. It includes three different mini-games, related to 3 parts of the passenger journey while flying which include hand luggage. The passenger gets positive feedback when packing light and making sure the plane is boarded and deboarded smoothly with hand luggage. Negative feedback will be given when too much hand luggage is on board, informing the passenger about consequences of the hand luggage on operations and with direct consequence on the flying experience. This way people can learn what the consequences are of bringing a lot of hand luggage and make them more aware the next time they pack their bag for inside the cabin. This solution will therefore inform the passengers, nudging them towards taking less hand luggage in a fun way instead of simply banning the hand luggage from the plane as a rule set by the airline.

Deboarding
Handluggage
Passenger
Airline
User Experience
Turn around time
Brussels Airlines

http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:3fa5ffbe-c496-4823-8c98-7d93ad9cb9c0

Student theses

master thesis

© 2018 Claudia Spaargaren