What is it?
Beacons at Heathrow present unique opportunities for airport tenants and stakeholders. For your business at Heathrow as an Airline, Retailer, Ground Handler or Support Services, you need the most optimal channels to interact with your passengers. Beacons offer the advantage of location-based technology to enhance the personalisation of messages and offers on passengers’ smartphones and devices. Our beacon infrastructure simplifies this so you can choose and design applications to fulfil your needs.
What do we offer?
Heathrow’s Common Beacon Infrastructure is built to provide access for all businesses to a platform of managed beacons, giving you the opportunity to build location based mobile applications without having to worry about beacons deployment and service. Our IATA standards-based solution means you only have to build apps once for all your destination airports.
- IATA Standards-based beacon service
- Heathrow managed and supported beacon fleet
- Cloud-based service for beacon information using SITA Common Beacon Registry (CBR)
- Incorporation of location services with mobile applications
Why do you need this service?
Passengers of all demographics are becoming increasingly reliant on their smartphones and connected devices to find offers and directions during their travels.
As per The Future is Connected report by SITA, 83% of passengers carry smartphones; a compelling reason for businesses at airports to connect with passengers through their mobile devices. With beacons you can implement a wide variety of functions such as wayfinding, flight information, baggage collection, distance to the gate, as well as offering loyalty programs and conveying duty-free promotions among others as passengers move round the airport.
Beacons can also be used as an additional channel to increase your revenues and provide passenger engagement.
How much does it cost?
Pricing is based on IATA zones
| Common Beacon | Installation charge | Monthly charge | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Common Beacon infrastructure | £1280 | Price on request | |
| Common Beacon Zone Change | £192 | £0 |
Quote for app development cost is additional as per requirement
Refer to Common Beacons Infrastructure Technical Specification document for the full list of zones
*Other Regulated Charges
What are the target response times?
| Targets | |||
|---|---|---|---|
| Down for all | Down for some | Down for one | |
| Response | |||
| Remote fix | |||
| Replacement | |||
What information do you need to know?
- Beacons make use of the Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) standard for communications
- Beacons send one-way BLE signals which can be read by nearby Bluetooth-enabled devices
- Beacons are compatible with both Apple iBeacons and Google Eddystone standard
- Common Beacon Registry integration to support our airline partners and to track IATA/ACI standards. The registry is beacon vendor agnostic and will ensure beacons use a common form of data sets based on industry standards
- Secure encrypted key access to REST2 based API set that is easy for web and mobile developers to get to grips with
- Integration with Heathrow and Locus Labs mapping solutions is optional
- Bluvision software development kits (SDKs) for Android and iOS platform at bluvision.com/developer
Why us?
At Heathrow, Airport Common Use principles are adopted to manage and accelerate the use of new technologies for equitable access. We have built the common beacon infrastructure at Heathrow, taking specific care to provide a fully-integrated service with:
- Common API
- Full beacon integration into the SITA Beacon Registry
- Fully airport supported infrastructure that mirrors the existing WLAN model
- Service wrap, both for requesting access and handling of incidents and problems as per the ITIL service mode
- No need to deploy your own beacons
- Unlimited use of beacon infrastructure in common use areas and your own device
- 24X7 support
Customised solutions through out partner network for:
- Support of global applications
- Support from airport applications developers