On August 6, 2008, Jason Hull will be presenting at the AAAE NextGen Airport Conference and Expo. He will cover how airports can use their websites as marketing tools to passengers, airlines, and general aviation. He will discuss the case study of the Charlottesville Albemarle Airport website and the AeroWeb product and cover best practices of websites throughout the industry.

More information can be found here.

Slides of my presentation are available here.

This week I was at the AAAE Conference in New Orleans, showcasing the AeroWeb product that we have just released at OpenSource Connections. Everyone who saw our demo seemed to be very impressed. I think that many of the airport executives I met realized they needed the better website that AeroWeb offers, with features like Flight Tracking, Online Booking and Airfare Deals (with referral bonuses for the airport), blogs, inline content editing right from your browser, custom directions, flash maps, and more. All wrapped in great designs customized to each airport.

But one reaction I got several times was “this looks great, but our county/city controls our airport and our website, and they want us to use the county IT staff and web page.” Basically they liked what we offered, but felt like they are locked into a single page static web page occasionally edited by County staff.

As an example, compare the Charlottesville Albemarle Airport website GoCho.com with this static web page of a regional airport in Hawaii, which is part of a larger state web site. The differences should be obvious. GoCho is a dynamic site providing real time information of immediate interest to passengers, and gives them incentives to fly through Charlottesville. The Hawaii site provides a single paragraph of generic information about the airport. As a passenger, it doesn’t really tell me anything of value about whether or not this is an airport I would want to consider using during a trip to Hawaii.

If you’re an airport executive, you inherently understand this. But how do you convince your County or governing authority to give you the freedom to create and manage your own site? Here’s a few ideas for discussion points you can bring up with them. When you’ve convinced your board to build a new site, please make sure to contact us at AeroWeb so we can submit a bid!

1. Show passengers you have great deals too! If you are a regional airport competing for passengers with nearby larger airports, then you know it can be a struggle to convince passengers that they can get good prices through you. Perhaps not all your airfares are cheaper, but with our Flight Deals tab, great deals targeted to your airport will be displayed from Kayak.com. Especially with rising gas prices, if you can show passengers that they are going to get a comparable airfare through your airport, they will skip the longer drive to larger airports.
2. Give passengers the information they need. When passengers enter your airport, the first thing they probably do is check the arrivals and departures board. With our online flight tracking, you can give them the same experience on your website. We can integrate our tracking widget with your internal FIDS or with one of our online data partners.
3. Easy content management. With our inline editing tool, you will be able to manage all the content on your website, without involving AeroWeb staff or your County IT staff, and without any technical knowledge! One reason your County’s IT department may be reluctant to let you have your own website is out of a fear that they will have to maintain all the content for you. With AeroWeb, you can manage the website yourself, so there is no burden on other IT staff!
4. Managed hosting. We will host your AeroWeb site for you, which removes another area of concern your IT staff may have. They don’t need to worry about the database or server uptime, or providing you with traffic reports and other analytics about your website. We do all of that for you - so there is no extra burden on your County IT staff!
5. Provide updates to media and passengers. Since editing content on your site and blog is so easy, it can become a communications channel for you directly to your passengers and even local media. By providing the latest news about your airport online in a timely fashion, you may reduce your customer service calls and keep passengers happy!
6. Your airport website is not the same as the county landfill site. No disrespect meant to your local garbage collectors, but the fact of the matter is that your airport has more specific website needs than the local landfill. So why are they both using the same boring static pages on the County web site? The landfill is not competing for customers like you are, and they don’t need to provide timely and updated information to passengers who expect you to have a great website.
7. Providing the latest functionality on your website. AeroWeb is tuned in with the features that airports need. In addition to the features described above, we offer other widgets for weather, customized driving directions, advertising tools, and more! We can do custom development to meet your airport’s unique needs, and we are working on adding additional features too!

It’s Tuesday morning, which if the final day for exhibitors at the AAAE conference for airport executives in New Orleans. Eric, Riley, and myself, along with my wife Lauren, have been here since Saturday talking to regional airports around the country about OpenSource Connections new product AeroWeb.

The reception has been really great so far. While I think exhibitors always wish that there was more traffic by the booths, the quality of many of our leads has been very good. We are demo’ing the websites on our laptops, and have a screencast of AeroWeb running on a large monitor at the front of the booth. The screencast has certainly helped bring people into the booth, and our demos have been running very well so far and everyone who sees them seems to be impressed.

We’ve had conversations with a wide range of airports, with airport consultants who could conceivably recommend AeroWeb to their clients, with other vendors we could potentially partner with, and with industry journalists. We’ve also made a few contacts with companies who may be interested in the software development skills of OpenSource Connections, outside of our airport product.

The features we are showing airports for the most part seem to be right on. A couple of ideas that attendees have brought up have been interesting. One attendee noted that the main reason he felt people go to his airport website currently is not passengers, but vendors who are looking for information about RFP’s. So he wanted a content section with a lot of information about RFP’s. After looking at the websites of some other airports we’ve talked to, they also have at least a page with current RFP’s listed on it, and PDF downloads of the RFP’s right there. Of course, this is easy to do in AeroWeb, but we hadn’t put a page like that in our demos.

Another interesting observation made by a trainer from a small airport was “Can you schedule content to be published at a certain date?” The answer to this is also yes when you are editing content and blog posts through our back end Expression Engine administration tool. However that functionality and content versioning is not currently exposed through the inline editing tool we are primarily demo’ing to clients.

I’ve got some photos to post, so I’ll post those and more comments later today after the show ends. For now, I’ve got to run back to the booth for exhibiting hours!

Today, OpenSource Connections announced the launch of AeroWeb, the airport content management system, available at http://www.aerowebonline.com. Based on the success of our initial AeroWeb platform client, the Charlottesville Albemarle Airport Authority, http://www.gocho.com, we are commercializing the platform by which airports can manage their public facing websites.

AeroWeb delivers powerful features like up-to-date flight tracking, inline web editing of content, airfare deals, and flight booking—all in an easy-to-maintain and flexible architecture. It includes features such as inline page editing, flight tracking, booking and reservation engines, and airport blogs and news aggregators. Most airport websites are staid and not interactive; AeroWeb changes that and puts the airport customer at the front of the line.

We will be demonstrating AeroWeb at the American Association of Airport Executives annual conference in New Orleans from June 8 - 11. Come check us out there, or go to the website, http://www.aerowebonline.com, for more details.

Last Thursday, as thunder pealed in the background, I turned the television on to the local NBC affiliate to see what was happening with the weather. As it turned out, our county was under a tornado warning, with high winds and heavy storms.

As the anchors talked, they said that they had checked the Charlottesville Albemarle Airport’s website, www.gocho.com, to check on the flight status of inbound flights and that flights had not been significantly delayed because of the storms (there were no tornadoes, fortunately).

The NBC 29 anchors were not the only ones checking www.gocho.com that night. Since we launched live on April 21, the website had not seen as much traffic as it did on the night of the tornado, and into the early morning hours.

Note the May 8 and May 9 traffic. The tornado warning lasted from about 10 - 11 PM on May 8, and hits to the website carried over into the next day.

The site that enabled the anchors at NBC 29 to see how the weather was affecting flights was an endeavor four months in the making. The old Charlottesville Albemarle Airport Authority website had a Flash introduction and a difficult to navigate website. The Director, Barbara Hutchinson, sought to embark on a strategy that made the Charlottesville airport Central Virginia’s airport of choice, and she wanted a website which contained all of the information that a traveler would want from an airport, with as much information as possible without clutter.

Thus, OpenSource Connections, with Birch Studio Graphics offering design and Flash support, came up with an airport-focused content management system that allowed the GoCHO team to communicate most effectively with their clients. The biggest issue that they sought to overcome was handling phone calls from the public to answer questions that they could also find on a well-designed website. By reducing the volume of phone traffic and channeling those questions to the website, the Airport Authority could focus on operating the airport and improving the experience of travelers.

Working with Ms. Hutchinson and her team, we were able to pinpoint the highest value information that travelers sought and to tailor and deliver a website that provided that information in an easy to find manner. Additionally, by implementing a content management system, we were able to facilitate the Authority’s communication of information to the public. The old site was in static HTML, and was difficult to update information, whereas the new website can be updated on the fly. JetBlast, the new GoCHO blog, is one example of ways in which the Airport Authority can now communicate much more rapidly with the general public, and receive feedback on what they have to say.

We have also tied in FAA flight information and travel cost information from Kayak to a front page tabbed browsing system so that users can find flight deals from the CHO airport, creating a one-stop destination for people who want to find out more about commercial travel at the airport.

The resulting site, we think, serves the public well.  What do you think?  Contact us and let us know!