TL:DR: You may have seen my interview a couple weeks ago with Brian Antell from AskHumans. If not, see below. This article talks about how a fantastic new AI-powered listening tool is revolutionizing how we get feedback and what we do with it in an airport environment. Here’s the link to the full interview:

As I mentioned in the interview, airports aren’t just businesses, they are representations of their city. In some cases, their whole country. Every airport cares about two things:

1. Money
2. Customer experience

And not necessarily in that order. The first thing you see on Airport’s website isn’t about how much economic activity they’re generating, it’s how their customers are feeling:

For DFW, It’s “#OneDFW: A Customer First Community”

For DCA: “Your experience starts the minute you arrive”

For BWI: “Your Easy come, Easy go airport”

These are serious, thought out commitments. As an airport (or a developer or concessionaire) how do you know how you’re meeting them? Well, you ask people. You have a survey link on your website, you (or your developer) hire third party companies to do traveler intercepts and  mystery shops, and you respond to one-off complaints. The problem:

The Modern Airport Environment Has Outgrown Static Feedback

Traditional tools still have value — NPS scores, transactional data, and periodic customer satisfaction studies — but:

• They capture what happened, not why.
• They rarely provide useful insight fast enough to adjust operations or merchandising strategy mid-quarter, let alone mid-day.
• And because they’re often closed-ended surveys or report formats, they miss the nuance that drives actual traveler decision behavior.

Enter AskHumans

That’s why Clearport has teamed up with Askhumans to offer their revolutionary AI-powered customer sentiment tool. It’s really the tool I wished I had when I was working at BWI. Why is it so much better than anything we’ve used before?

1. You talk to it. Askhumans uses voice transcription to collect data. Instead of having to type or select options from a dropdown, you can just talk to the system the same way you talk to a friend. Talking just feels better for crafting sentences and so you talk MORE. Which means you give more data. more context, more specifics about what you like, don’t like, want to see more of. You also don’t get bored and quit as easily.
2. Askhumans talks back (sort of): Instead of manually  poring through reams of data, the machine learning model picks up positive or negative sentiment, trends, and outliers. It effectively listens and understands for you.
3. Scale and speed:Understanding what a lot of people think is really critical for making decisions when you have millions of people moving through the concourse every year. Responding to changes in what people think while you still have a window to do something about it is even more important.

1. Pre-RFP Market Positioning & Visioning

Before issuing a concessions RFP, AskHumans can capture real traveler preferences around:

• Food and retail categories: Do your customer preferences align with your assumptions?
• Price expectations: How much elasticity is there really? Is street plus 10 the ceiling?
• Amenity gaps: What are you missing that may not be obvious?
• Desired atmosphere or identity: Does your vibe match what your passenger’s?

This gives airport authorities evidence-based reasoning for square footage allocation, category targets, and operator selection criteria.

2. Concept Validation for Local / Sense-of-Place Brands

Most airports wantto uplift beloved local restaurants and retail — but the risk is real, especially for microbusineses and specialty retail. Sure, local burger chain X has a cult following and lots of social media hits, but is it a product market fit with the demographics of the flyers in Concourse D? Or is it a better fit for A? Or does it fit at all? Instead of guessing, you can find out to a pretty high degree of certainty just by using different QR codes and surveys. Same question, different audience.

AskHumans allows:

• Traveler testing of brand awareness
• Concept “fit” analysis
• Feedback on menu/price assumptions

before commitment and capital expenditure.

Less guesswork. More confidence. At $2,500/SF in construction costs, and what could be a game-changing or catastrophic business decision for an entrepreneur, better to know upfront.

3. Monitoring Operator Performance in Real Time

Instead of waiting for quarterly or annual reporting cycles:

• Create recurring AskHumans Loops with passenger segments & concession staff
• Detect when sentiment, speed of service, or perceived value shifts

For airport developers, this enables proactive intervention, not post-mortem analysis. Developers and Airports typically rely on audits and terminal walks to discover issues. But what if instead of ten people covering acres of ground, you had the ability to have everyone in the concourse provide feedback instantaneously? And get notified immediately if there’s a triage situation happening.

Want to to take the tool for a test? Scan the QR code or hit the link to take the Friends and family airport F&B survey. I’ll publish the findings in an upcoming post.

Take the Airport F&B Quiz: https://app.askhumans.com/study/2937f6e2-3a68-4b83-92e1-9d63f18bfeb6/response