Envisioning aviation business integration
Aviation business integration is a simple concept. All service providers in the aviation business could cooperate better to make the experience of the traveller much richer and easier. By doing so they would enhance the quality of their product while reducing their costs. This would be the beginning of a virtuous spiral where all would see growing numbers of satisfied customers and an increase in the scale of service provider businesses.
This idea is slowly being applied at airports. In Europe, for example, the historical lack of efficiency in air traffic management has led to the Single European Sky programme whose aim it is to make European airspace more coherent. This is a massive and complex undertaking that sensitively affects all contributors to the aviation industry.
Aviation business integration (ABI) is the superlative following collaborative decision making (CDM) and the less well-defined total airport management (TAM). The pages that follow will relate to each of these concepts to varying degrees.
The ultimate goal of ABI is the best possible service to the travelling public. Try to envision a world in which each traveller is completely informed about his travel process, where promises of service are kept and customers are respected. This will give customers a sense of tranquility and ease. It will open up perspectives for users to use their time with optimal productivity—also when this means to simply rest and watch the world go by. It will, some day, make what travelers experience typically today seem crude, barbaric and entirely unattractive. The act of travelling, often time of low value, will become a integral part of any trip so that there is hardly a sense of wasted time.