During the month of July Finnish Airport operator Finavia will test a new service at the nation’s capital gateway of Helsinki, in which passengers can borrow portable chargers to power their mobile phones. The pocket chargers are designed to liberate passengers from fixed power sockets so they are able to move around the terminal and are free to decide how and where they spend their time before their flights depart.
The utilisation rate of fixed recharging points at Helsinki Airport is extremely high during peak hours, and with the pocket charger passengers will not have to waste time looking for a power socket, reducing stress levels in the terminal.
“Getting more free time reduces stress and gives passengers better opportunities to utilise the services at the airport,” said Eero Knuutila, Head of Service Development at Helsinki Airport. Helsinki Airport is already well supplied with power sockets and recharging points, and Knuutila explained that the utilisation rate of the fixed recharging points is extremely high during peak hours. With the pocket charger, passengers will not have to waste time looking for a power socket, reducing stress levels in the terminal.
Personal mobile devices have become ever more important to passengers – especially to those travelling alone, who tend to use mobile phones and other electronic devices more than other passengers when visiting the airport. Transit passengers may already have been in the air for several hours, and their smartphone battery may have run out, so they have an immediate need to recharge it before their next flight – especially as transit passengers are extremely active users of the free wireless internet connection at Helsinki Airport.
Testing portable mobile phone chargers is part of Finavia’s customer experience development programme, and is a pilot project being conducted as part of research for a thesis at Tampere University of Technology. “Until significant advances are made in battery technology for mobile devices to allow wireless recharging of devices with new methods, such as via WLAN or infrared, we have to try out alternative ways of recharging batteries,” explained Salla Hankivuo, who is writing her diploma thesis. The project at Helsinki Airport is unique, since no similar experiment has been conducted anywhere else in the world.
The test began on 7 July and ends on 23 July, and the pocket chargers, which feature Finavia’s logo, will be distributed in the gate area for European and domestic flights. The chargers, which have a micro-USB plug, can be used for the majority of Android and Windows phones, and will be collected from passengers before they board their planes.
