Developing friction-free airports

At T2RL Engage 2025, a panel of airport and aviation leaders: Steve Armitage (Heathrow), Stijn Verleye (Brussels Airport), Oliver Wigdahl (Ink Innovation), Hadrien Musitelli (CitizenPlane), and moderator Bert Craven (T2RL), took on one of the industry’s toughest challenges: creating a friction-free airport experience.

What emerged was not a utopian vision of “seamless” travel but a frank acknowledgement of the messy realities, and a roadmap for how airports, airlines, and partners can better prepare for disruption while still delivering on passenger expectations.

Friction is everywhere

Opening the discussion, panellists reflected on the sheer number of potential choke points across the passenger journey. As Bert Crave (T2RL) noted:

“If we sat here and started making a list of sources of friction in airports, we’d probably be here all day.”

Oliver Wigdahl (Ink Innovation) framed the issue as one of managing expectations:

“People come to an airport with an expectation that they’re going to receive what they bought… The problem is that things happen around you that then cause change. At the heart of what we’re trying to deal with is how do we manage change, and how do we manage it in a way that allows a passenger to receive what they thought they were about to receive.”

Disruption as the real test

For Stijn Verleye of Brussels Airport, the biggest challenge comes when normal operations collapse:

“We had a cyber attack on a Friday evening… by Saturday, our customer care team was handling ten times the calls, our chatbot use was up tenfold, and the website had four times more visits. In those moments, passengers don’t care whether the information comes from the airline or the airport. They just want answers.”

Resilience matters as much as efficiency. As Verleye put it:

“The world is becoming more unstable. We need to make the systems more resilient, not just more efficient.”

Oliver Wigdahl agreed, pointing out that redundancy within the same tech stack is no longer enough:

“Airports have historically invested in core systems and added redundancy into the same stack. But true resilience means having something outside of that — a separate, independent layer. It’s not about backup servers anymore. It’s about operational continuity when everything else goes offline.”

The digital spine and its missing links

Steve Armitage (Heathrow Airport) emphasised that even “good days” are riddled with small disruptions, from motorway delays to late check-ins. His analogy stuck with the audience:

“Fundamentally, with all systems, the weak points are always the joints. The more we can make those joins solid, the better the flow, which is what airports are really about.”

But the industry still has a long way to go:

“There is no frictionless journey at the moment. There are too many legacy processes… We’ve got this mantra about the passenger’s digital spine. It’s something we’re not achieving yet. And the question is, how do you stitch together all those data points without making it feel disjointed?”

Complexity vs. Orchestration

Hadrien Musitelli (CitizenPlane) warned that growing disruption will only intensify the challenge:

“Disruption will continue to increase. The real challenge is preparing for it without compromising the experience during normal times.”

Meanwhile, as airlines expand ancillary services, Oliver Wigdahl cautioned that complexity can quickly overwhelm operations:

“If you took the members of an orchestra and just said ‘play’, it would sound horrible. But with a conductor in place, you can deal with high levels of complexity. That’s what we need in aviation: orchestration.”

Identity and biometrics: promise and headwinds

The panel agreed that digital identity and biometrics have the potential to remove repetitive checks and make airport flows significantly smoother. Steve Armitage (Heathrow) added:

“I think perhaps [passengers will] start noticing the difference when they can just walk up and smile.”

But regulatory constraints are slowing progress. EU restrictions on biometric use, plus the introduction of new border checks such as the Entry/Exit System, are in some cases adding friction instead of removing it. Balancing efficiency gains with privacy and compliance will be critical to real progress.

The road ahead: incremental but critical

Panellists agreed that while “frictionless” may be unrealistic, airports and partners can make measurable progress through collaboration, data sharing, and targeted innovation. From biometrics to shared information systems, each step helps reduce the daily frictions that define the passenger journey.

As the moderator summed it up:

“The thing most likely to bring about an improvement in customer experience in airports is laser focus by airports and airlines alike on fixing problems incrementally, step by step.”