Originally Posted by
24left
Looking back to when this thread was started in Sept 2016, I was always baffled at the fact that the YYC airport authorities, management, designers and everyone else involved in Call-to-Gate, thought is was a good idea.
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If you are going to try a new system, there has to be involvement at the outset from the people who are going to use it.
I have to assume these questions were asked and maybe some testing was done, but this is a very expensive lesson for airport management everywhere.
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Sad that so much time, space and money was wasted.
Call to Gate was a good conceptual idea that solved a few of the troubles of the old YYC international arrangement. Specifically,
- More retail variety, old transborder terminal had 5 F&B places and 2-3 retail places.
- All retail in one place. Old concourses had retail and F&B all over the place. Further if you wanted a starbucks, had to go to far end of the concourse.
- Because of the above two factors, post security retail and F&B figures (both gross sales and sales per pax) were well below average for NA airport.
- The central seating area provided a good congregating place.
What CAA did not count on was a large number of travelers that were/are heavily opposed to the retail concept and simply wanted to wait by the gate rather than in the central area.
That said, Call to Gate provisions were not expensive to introduce. The main cost is a customizable FIDS system to handle the gate displays. The seating and central retail area had to be built anyway. The information counter and large FID screens would have to be purchased anyway.
The first casualty of CtG was the author of the system, Stephan Poirier, Chief commercial officer and EVP. He walked the plank 3 weeks after the terminal opened.
CtG was tested during the trials, however the following unplanned areas interfered with the trial effectiveness.
- WS computer system issues prevented pax from dwelling in the retail area to begin with.
- The script timeline had little in the way of sitting around time because most of the retail places were not fully set up.
- The trials were set up to test the connection possibilities, OSS, TWOV, Traditional connection; not a lot of time on a simple departure or arrival.