Taking flight with AI.

Building stronger relationships with visitors and travelers

Auckland International Airport is New Zealand’s primary gateway to the country. After pandemic lockdowns lifted and airport traffic increased, the airport invested in infrastructure projects to make travelers’ experiences more enjoyable.

Airport leadership tasked marketers with improving communications to help travelers understand everything that the airport has to offer through their customer preference centre, including new parking options, restaurants, shopping, and lounge and VIP services. When Auckland Airport was hit with unprecedented torrential rain, leading to citywide flooding, leadership realized that improved communication wasn’t just important for traveler enjoyment, but also critical for handling emergency communications to customers.

Paloma Vivanco-Coutts, Digital Channels Manager at Auckland Airport, helped to lead a digital transformation that aimed to strengthen the relationships and communication between the airport and all its visitors. A big part of this transformation needed to involve coordinated communication from the airport’s different business units, including parking information, ecommerce, retail, and lounge services. Rather than sending multiple disconnected emails that pull travelers’ attentions in different directions, marketers wanted travelers to see information right when they need it, helping to guide them down an ideal, personalised path to start their travel on the right foot.

The team knew that the first thing they needed to address was their data. They spent time capturing data from multiple channels and cleansing CRM data sets to lay a strong foundation. When they were ready to act, Auckland Airport implemented Adobe Journey Optimizer to unlock omnichannel, personalised messaging.

" Adobe Journey Optimizer allows us to create a connected ecosystem between our digital customer touchpoints. That’s helped us achieve a positive return on investment in a short period of time."

Richard Wilkinson

Chief Digital Officer, Auckland International Airport

Driving ROI while respecting customer preferences

Data from parking bookings, ecommerce purchases, website interactions, and lounge bookings all feed into Journey Optimizer to help marketers create multichannel journeys in real time.

For example, a traveler who plans to park at the airport sees an automated reminder of an upcoming parking reservation. When they enter the parking lot, they may receive another message with an offer for discounted shopping depending on their preferences, which are tracked through a new preference centre. Orchestrating timely and relevant messages along the customer journey creates an elevated, enjoyable experience without overwhelming travelers, which has led to a 72% increase in automation revenue since implementing Journey Optimizer.

While most messages are currently sent via email, Auckland Airport will soon launch SMS and mobile app push notifications so visitors can receive offers on their preferred channels. Email alone has already experienced a 10% improvement on traditional open rates due to better data enabling the right message at the right time. Web teams are also migrating websites to Adobe Experience Manager Sites, and planned integrations with Journey Optimizer will allow marketers to bring more consistent, personalised engagement to web pages as well.

“Adobe Journey Optimizer allows us to create a connected ecosystem between our digital customer touchpoints,” says Richard Wilkinson, Chief Digital Officer at Auckland Airport. “That’s helped us achieve a positive return on investment in a short period of time.”

"We have been really impressed with the initial positive results we are getting using AI Assistant. It is early days still, but it is exciting."

Paloma Vivanco-Coutts

Digital Channels Manager, Auckland International Airport

Understanding and acting on data faster with generative AI

While multichannel messaging is critical, the speed and ease of use are what truly impressed marketers. “We’ve been thrilled with the move to Journey Optimizer because it’s a lot more intuitive. It’s a marketer’s tool for sure, with all of the advanced capabilities you’d expect, but it’s also so easy to use that we can get more people involved and move quickly,” says Vivanco-Coutts.

When issues arise such as unexpected flooding due to heavy rains, ongoing infrastructure projects, or even operational challenges in carparks, travelers need to know as soon as possible. Previously, it could take hours for teams to identify affected audiences, create an email, and send it out. Now it takes minutes.

Auckland Airport attributes the speed to many factors. Intuitive operations and reusable templates allow anyone to create an audience and pull together an email in minutes — especially important as emergencies can happen after hours with only a small team available to respond. The AI Assistant Content Accelerator feature in Journey Optimizer speeds up content production even more, reducing the time needed to push out an email by approximately 40%.

“If we have issues in our carparks, we can use the AI prompt in Journey Optimizer to input the details and it gives us four variations of an email,” explains Vivanco-Coutts. “We might choose one or two, edit slightly, and forward to stakeholders to let them choose which version they prefer. It helps overcome any initial writer’s block and give us more consistency in the tonality of our messaging.”

Sourcing simple imagery for a newsletter or email, which typically required searching the image library and often asking designers to help with edits, is also simplified with help from Adobe Firefly. “Adobe Firefly empowers our marketing managers to create images that reinforce communications and get newsletters and messages developed faster, while enabling designers to stay focused on their bigger projects,” says Vivanco-Coutts.

Working with the ecommerce team, the marketing team has started testing AI Assistant Content Accelerator to generate subject lines and calls to action for an email campaign. One test resulted in five times the number of transactions. While still in its early days, indications suggest that it has a significant potential to increase revenue for more business units.

In addition, the team is excited to start experimenting with AI Assistant to use natural language to understand data, filter audiences, and create campaign tests without needing the usual specialised training. For example, rather than needing someone who understands how to write a database query, the call center team could potentially ask AI Assistant how many customers were affected by a parking incident, which could help them understand how to staff their desks for the day.

“We have been really impressed with the initial positive results we are getting using AI Assistant. It is early days still, but it is exciting,” says Vivanco-Coutts. “We hope it will inspire more adoption which will help us connect all of the data and business units that we need to create a truly end-to-end experience that follows travelers throughout their time at the airport.”

AI for everyday marketing

Auckland Airport has big plans for the future of its digitally connected customers. The marketing team continues to expand how it uses automation and generative AI to deliver more complex, personalised customer journeys at scale to millions of travelers every year. They believe that AI has massive potential to become a game-changer for many organisations, if they choose to accept it.

“A lot of people are waiting for that big, splashy AI use case that will completely change how they work,” says Vivanco-Coutts. “But instead, they should look for AI-powered features in their favourite solutions and start incorporating it into their daily process. Write subject lines, test out variations, and you will quickly see the results.”