Leading airline redefines personalized travel

Any air traveler knows that digital signage is critical to the airport experience, helping passengers get where they need to be, when they need to be there.

Under a broader initiative to exceed customer expectations by creating a frictionless airport visit, United needed to update its digital signage solution. The existing system was static and rigid, requiring technical expertise – and, in some cases, complex logic within code – to update, which severly limited agility. The COVID-19 pandemic accelerated the need for a smarter solution, to provide fast, up-to-date information for customer and employee health, safety, and overall experience satisfaction.

United wanted a solution that reflected the understanding that no two customers are alike; some prefer an entirely self-service option while others need a more human touch. They demanded a platform with deep agility to efficiently serve dynamic content in context of unique customer preferences.

The Sitecore Experience Platform created a single, flexible, streamlined, and secure interface and workflow to blend API-driven content, such as flight information and standby lists, with dynamic content, like weather maps, to quickly change and create content in a rapidly evolving environment. From the moment travelers arrive at the airport, this content, along with United-generated ads, wayfinding, and messaging, provide the information they need from gate to flight, baggage and lounge areas, and employee displays.

The flexible architecture is deeply integrating with other United tools, data sources, and APIs, and has evolved to support localized content control for front-line employees and destination-based messaging. The solution has greatly improved efficiency, with taxonomy-driven cotent, enabling an ‘author once, use many’ approach and reducing duplication with a content dictionary format.

Furthermore, a powerful extensible conditional rendering engine puts power into the business user’s hands through Sitecore’s extensibility to support custom rules integrated with United’s APIs. The system also natively supports multilingual content integrated with third-party automated translation services to quickly cascade translated content into all desired languages.

Finally, United has the ability to manage content without depending on technologists or consultants, helping them keep up with evolving situations either across the digital signage system or specific to one airport or gate.

The Sitecore digital signage solution enables United to efficiently and effectively provide the real-time content passengers need. Outdated or irrelevant content is a thing of the past: quick-to-market personalized messaging slashed weeks of effort down to hours, and trimmed content changes from weeks to minutes. Experience optimization capabilities allow United to experiment with different layouts, design features, and content — a feature that was not possible previously.

Initial customer and employee feedback indicate that the digital signage creates an immersive experience, delivering an easier, more predictable travel day and eases concerns about cleanliness and safety.