LAX Airport Revamped $ 14 Billion and New Happy Face Machines to Assess Satisfaction

If you've ever been on a weekday morning when entering Terminal 1 at the Los Angeles International Airport, you may have mistaken for Dante's ninth circle of hell. The frozen lake No movement.

This is not fun.

But this terminal, and all terminals here, have turned into a place that could almost make you … happy. In fact, there are machines with "happy faces" that allow you to record your satisfaction in some parts of the airport. More on this shortly.

Half a century ago, LAX was a jewel of modern aviation, with its sleek, modern lines and horseshoe layout. But he did not follow the growth of the population. Last year, a record 87.5 million people went through LAX, making it the second largest airport in the country, after Atlanta, and the fourth in the world.

"It's our time," said Deborah Flint, CEO of Los Angeles World Airports. Under his supervision, the airport is leading the country in the field of mbadive infrastructure improvements. From here 2023, people who drive a rental car in a car park / car rental will be taken away in 10 minutes.

"Traffic here will be a thing of the past," Flint promises. From here until 2024, you will be able to access any terminal once security has pbaded. Construction projects offer flexibility to adapt to technological advances, such as driverless cars. "What we're doing here at LAX is probably eight different mega projects at a time," says Flint.

In total, the project costs $ 14 billion.

How to pay for this? Flint says the airport is going into debt and is using the profits from terminal leases. The airport also depends on a federally regulated fee for each air ticket for airport projects; this fee, according to Flint, is currently $ 4.50. "It's the same rate for 19 years," she says. "You can imagine the cost of anything 19 years ago and what it costs today." With inflation, she says the fees should be closer to $ 8.

LAX is not the only one to give a little mischief. The airport O 'Hare Chicago has begun an expansion of $ 8.7 billion.

New York plans to spend $ 10 billion on upgrading JFK and another $ 8 billion on LaGuardia. (Hundreds of millions of dollars have been spent to convert Kennedy's old TWA terminal into a hotel).

Does it work? According to J.D. Power, airport customer satisfaction is up and AirHelp says LAX has moved from 100th in 2018 to 69th in 2019, which Flint is pleased to point out. "The United States is the cradle of aviation and our airports should be the ones that other airports around the world aspire to," she said.

In some terminals, screens have been installed at the bathroom exits, where pbadengers can tap a happy or unhappy face to express their feelings about the bathroom. Tap the "unhappy face" red to get a list. Does the bathroom need more toilet paper? Paper napkins? LAX uses this information in real time to keep the bathrooms clean (and Happy Face monitors are also said to be cleaned regularly).

These instant-feedback "happy-face" machines are appearing not only at airports, but also at retailers. The leading company in this sector is a Finnish start-up called HappyOrNot, created by Heikki Vaananen, who had the idea after a bad experience in a retail store. "No one was helping out there and I thought it would be nice to have a quick and effective way to comment," he says.

Start-up costs amounted to $ 1.1 million. Its first investor was Northzone, the largest funder of Spotify, based in Sweden. Marta Sjögren from Northzone has found herself pressing the HappyOrNot buttons at airports and has become curious. "What kind of big business, probably American, is it?" she remembers. "I discovered that it was not a big company. It was a small organically grown organically grown in Finland.

HappyOrNot has announced that it has 30,000 terminals in 130 countries and more than one billion in total support. Revenue for 2019 is expected to reach $ 20 million. "Our database is huge," says Vaananen.

Northzone started with a $ 10 million investment and plans to invest "a lot" more, according to Sjorgen. She sees machines used in places such as hospitals and hotels, creating a "happiness index" for these entities.

For now, however, the machines are found mainly in airports and retail stores, which use the data to make various decisions. "Retailers, for example, can improve their workforce at peak times," says Sjögren. "Airports, for example, can rethink the number of security points open at a given time."

So … what is the ratio of happy to unhappy responses? One could imagine that people would be more inclined to press the "unhappy" button if they did. Vaananen says this is not the case.

"What we have learned is that about 80% of the population is making good returns," says Vaananen, even at airports. "Usually, people are happy."