Tampa International Airport

Customer

Tampa International Airport (TPA) is a major transport hub in Florida connecting the Tampa Bay Area to over 90 destinations around the world through nonstop flights operated by more than 20 domestic and international airlines. It processes over 25 million passengers annually and to support future growth, TPA partnered with AeroCloud in 2019 to automate gate management.

Challenge

TPA has a huge volume of flights traveling in and out of the airport – more than 600 daily during peak periods. TPA’s effort to smoothly manage these large volumes was undermined by manual processes, with staff spending too much time coordinating with airlines and managing gate allocations.

With the airport expecting to welcome nearly a million additional passengers each year, as well as a future Airside D terminal to be constructed by 2028, TPA knew it needed a more efficient gate allocation process to manage these increases effectively.

Solution

Automation was the key ingredient for TPA to streamline gate management. It deployed AeroCloud’s Gate Management Systems (GMS), a module of AeroCloud’s intelligent Airport Management System (iAMS), to move away from manual processes and cumbersome requirements to source third-party data from the likes of airlines’ ground handlers and other stakeholders.

Instead, the operations dashboard within the GMS gives staff full visibility into gate and stand allocations and enables them to automatically plan gate usage based on real-time data. This also gives staff the agility to resolve potential conflicts with gate allocation ahead of time as airport staff receive notifications of flight cancellations, delays and diversions as they occur.

TPA utilises the passenger predictions dashboard within the GMS for easier passenger forecasting. This empowers its teams to make proactive decisions based on the peaks and troughs of arriving and departing passengers, including deploying additional resources such as janitorial and police to drive the best passenger experience possible.

Thanks to AeroCloud’s promise of unlimited user licenses at no extra cost, all relevant airport stakeholders have access to gate information from any device. For example, the airport’s airlines are using the system to request gate and stand resources for irregular activities, or requesting a change of resource in real time and in line with any changes to their daily operations.

Outcome

Through using AeroCloud, the airport is able to proactively forecast gate and stand allocations ahead of time, saving countless hours per week through the automation of much of the work surrounding resource allocation.

AeroCloud provides a central source of truth for all airport stakeholders to access in real time, ensuring that the airport is constantly proactive in their approach to airport operations and any irregular activity, instead of being reactive to situations as they occur.