Service levels
The issue: Airport congestion and increased security requirements mean that the experience of passengers travelling through Heathrow is no longer the experience it once was. Many of our facilities are tired and outdated and not up to the standards that our passengers expect.
Our approach: Passengers are our most important stakeholders and ensuring a good experience for our customers is vital to the long term success of our business.
The opening of Terminal 5 in 2008 will enable us to transform the rest of Heathrow into a world-class international gateway. BAA has an investment plan that will deliver world-class facilities, more space for security, and improved environmental performance. Over the next few years almost the entire airport will be rebuilt, refurbished or redesigned.
By 2012, most of our passengers will be travelling through terminals that aren’t even open today. For more information, see www.heathrowairport.com/transformation.
Quality Survey Monitoring (QSM)
We research customer perceptions through a feedback scoring system called QSM, which has been in place for around 20 years at Heathrow. This gives us a measure of passenger satisfaction on a scale of 1 to 5 (1 = poor and 5 = excellent), with a wide variety of airport facilities including cleanlines, wayfinding, security queuing, check-in and departure lounge. In total around 40,000 passengers are interviewed each year.
The results of these surveys assist us in prioritising our investment in airport facilities and also inform the discussions we have with the many business partners and airlines who also contribute to the customer experience.
Our performance: The graph below shows the trend of passenger responses to the question ‘How would you rate your overall experience in this terminal/airport today?’ The results represent moving annual average scores, plotted at quarterly intervals between January 2004 to March 2007.
| Apr/Jun | Jul/Sep | Oct/Dec | Jan/Mar | |
| 2006/07 | 4.0 | 4.0 | 3.9 | 4.0 |
| 2005/06 | 4.0 | 3.9 | 3.9 | 4.0 |
| 2004/05 | 3.9 | 3.9 | 3.9 | 4.0 |
Overall the graph shows that scores have remained fairly steady despite the new security rules introduced from last August that have led to extended queuing.
We use signs and leaflets and have published information on our website to inform passengers about hand luggage restrictions to help prevent delays to journeys.
We have recruited new security guards and invested in new security equipment to reduce queuing times.
Our plans:
- Queuing time to be reduced to less than five minutes, 95% of the time.
We will set targets at Heathrow to improve scores in the QSM survey.
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