Case Study: Heathrow Airport Digital Transformation | Publicis Sapient

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How Heathrow brought essential airport information into one place.

A passenger-first website made travel planning simpler while driving more bookings and purchases.

hero-customer-story-reimagining-the-passenger-journey

Client Heathrow

Industry Travel & Hospitality

Topic Experience & Commerce

Heathrow’s website needed to do more than help passengers find a flight. Travelers needed one reliable resource for the full airport journey. The London airport also needed a customer web platform that could strengthen its relationship with passengers and scale for the future of travel. Publicis Sapient worked with Heathrow to rethink that digital passenger journey around a mobile-first approach to customer engagement. Several websites moved onto one core CMS, creating a unified digital foundation for passenger information, airport retail and traveler services.

Airline passengers were seeking a seamless, unified and reliable resource to guide them through their travels from finding places to eat and shop at the airport, to boarding their flights to and from Heathrow. The airport needed a partner to help create a customer-centric digital solution, fit to scale for the future of travel.

Publicis Sapient transformed Heathrow’s customer journey using a holistic approach, addressing the end-to-end online experience from all angles. Along with migrating the airport’s existing website from Opentext to Adobe Experience Manager, our team helped Heathrow define the visual direction, style, language and experience for the new website, as well as shape the content blueprint and migration roadmap. While implementing the overall creative and technology services, Publicis Sapient helped Heathrow design a digital strategy for airport retail offerings to enable seamless interactions between retailers and rushing passengers.

Publicis Sapient delivered an end-to-end website design, build, migration and content refresh in nine months from start to finish. During the peak of COVID-19, this new platform served as the main communication channel for passengers, helping them feel secure in their travel plans. Whether it was for announcements of new pandemic protocols or terminal changes, our solution provided convenient updates for Heathrow customers when they needed them the most. Our team also implemented an agile engineering discipline for Heathrow core teams to manage new cloud technology, as they continue to evolve ahead of customer needs.

" It’s fantastic to be working with Publicis Sapient on our digital efforts. Our new website heathrow.com has been entirely reorganized around the passenger for a seamless, unified offer that is fit for future purpose. We are excited for what we can further achieve together on our transformation journey. "
— Pete Burns
Director, VP of Digital, eCommerce & Marketing, Heathrow Airport

Chandan Banerjee

Senior Director Agile Program Management

Relevant Links

• How Heathrow Transformed the Digital Passenger Experience
• From Airport Website to Airport Marketplace
• The Airport as a Real-Time Communications Platform
• Connected Journeys in Travel: What Airports Can Learn from Smart Destinations, Airlines and Travel Platforms
• Transformation digitale dans l’aviation : une opportunité concrète pour les aéroports français (Europe)
• Transformación digital aeroportuaria en México: de sitio informativo a plataforma comercial y operativa (LATAM)
• FAQ (FAQ)
• 10 Things Buyers Should Know About Heathrow’s Digital Passenger Experience Transformation (LIST)