How can airports fully embrace multimodal and interoperable mobility ecosystems to deliver sustainability goals and offer a superior passenger experience?

Abstract

The future of mobility will be fundamentally different from what we know today. While demand for mobility will thrive again after the pandemic, new means of transport and new market players will shape everyday customer mobility of the 2030s and 2040s. To overcome the challenges that the mobility market of 2050 will pose, airports need to fully embrace multimodal and interoperable mobility ecosystems in order to deliver sustainability goals and offer a superior passenger experience. Using the example of Frankfurt Airport, this article addresses the complexity of a mobility landscape in flux. It will be shown how intermodality can both address sustainability demands and provide a customer-centric approach to innovation and digitalisation with regard to mobility. The purpose of this paper is to present one possible approach to the set of challenges it describes: the mobility hub. Current mobility options and customer needs are analysed and, supported by the findings of a customer survey, focus areas allowing airports to evolve towards mobility ecosystems of the future are discovered. Two main goals are identified that support the airport's transformation into a mobility hub, thus suggesting and promoting a possible best practice and providing strategic direction: quality of connectivity and quantity of means of transport. For both, suggestions for fields of action are provided that range from short to long-term strategy.