The future of airports

Accessibility, robotics, and human touch.

Flying is something we all optimise for. No matter how frequent the flyer, we're always iterating to get our travel routine down to a T.

The airport journey has been built around self-service. Yet only about 55% of travellers use it (SITA). You'd expect faster take-up from people this obsessed with optimising. But nearly half still turn to a person, wanting a better experience than the standard app gives.

In 2024, about 9.4 billion passengers passed through the world's airports. That's more than the world's population. So it naturally carries every age, ability, language, background and level of experience. Standardisation at that scale has not been achieved, which is why the human touch is still needed.

An airport is one of the few places, or businesses, that cannot choose its user. Everyone, regardless of ability, passes through. It has to work for all of them by default.

So how does an airport serve every need, and stay efficient doing it?

My pov: accessibility. Let robotics carry the standard, and free people for the complex needs that aren't.

Accessibility at Airports.

The airport is no longer just somewhere you pass through. It's somewhere you spend. In 2024, airports made around $73 billion worldwide from shops, food, lounges and parking. That was about 37% of total airport revenue globally, and it runs higher at big hubs, closer to 40 to 47% in Europe and the Middle East. Commercial income is where airports are focused on growing, because airline fees are capped and competitive.

That makes the passenger a guest, a shopper and a consumer, all at once. So accessibility can't sit in one department. It has to work across retail, food, lounges, wellness, medical services and entertainment.

Lets look at Schiphol.

Schiphol handled 66.8 million passengers in 2024, close to 183,000 a day. It is one of the best-connected airports in Europe, and it is midway through a €10 billion rebuild running to 2035, including a new terminal, with better accessibility named as a goal.

From early 2028, Schiphol is bringing assistance for passengers with reduced mobility in-house. It's been outsourced since 2003. That's around 1,000 staff serving roughly 750,000 passengers a year. A big function to take on.

A good hotel doesn't outsource its front desk. It owns the guest experience, especially the moment someone arrives needing help. Schiphol is doing the same thing, treating assistance as part of the brand rather than something it buys in from outside.

My POV: you don't pull a service in-house unless you've decided it is a core business priority.

Schiphol expects the number of passengers needing assistance to keep rising as the population ages. Older travellers are a growing part of the customer base, and more likely to need support. Building for them now is good business.

Robotics & Accessibility

Since 2023, Schiphol has been testing autonomous wheelchairs from WHILL. A traveller gets in, selects a gate, and the chair drives itself there, avoiding obstacles, then returns on its own. It is free and needs no booking.

This is not a one-airport experiment. WHILL's autonomous service now runs at 26 airports worldwide, with more than a million rides delivered, including Heathrow, Munich and Haneda.

The pattern is consistent. Robotics takes over the routine job of moving someone from A to B. That frees trained staff for the parts a machine can't do: the complex needs.

This answers the efficiency question from earlier. Automation handles the routine at scale that frees trained staff for the bespoke, complex needs. Handling the routine efficiently is what makes the tailored, human help affordable to sustain.

The same move everywhere

Wheelchair assistance has been standard for decades. What's changed is the range of needs airports now design for, as awareness of hidden and non-visible disabilities has grown.

A set of tools has become common at major hubs: sensory rooms and sensory kits for neurodivergent travellers, and apps like Aira that connect blind and low-vision passengers to a live agent who describes the terminal and reads the screens.

Dubai has a quiet, sensory-friendly lounge for travellers with autism and hidden disabilities, and 45,000 staff trained to support neurodivergent passengers. Singapore Changi runs Care@Changi, with a sensory space, hidden-disability support and trained staff across the airport.

This is also becoming measurable. Airports Council International, the global trade body for airports, now runs an Accessibility Enhancement Accreditation. It scores airports on a three-level scale, and Hong Kong has reached Level 3, the top rank.

Where is this headed.

In the last few years, I had the chance to shape Nike EMEA's accessibility initiatives and strategy. Accessibility is a useful design lens. It forces you to design for the hardest use case, which leaves you with a product that works for everyone. Ultimately it is about enhancing human experience equally, agnostic of industry or sector.

Accessibility at airports is shifting from a welfare obligation to a piece of commercial infrastructure. Four forces are pushing it there:

• an ageing population that grows the assisted-travel segment every year

• rising awareness of different needs, and demand for an experience beyond the standard one

• regulation such as the European Accessibility Act, which raised the baseline across the EU from 2025

• a commercial model that now depends on the passenger staying, spending and coming back

Taken together, these point to accessibility becoming a standard part of how a competitive hub operates, shaped by demand and regulation rather than obligation alone.

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Sources: passenger and revenue figures, ACI (2024). Self-service adoption, SITA. Schiphol passenger numbers, in-housing, staffing, autonomous wheelchair testing and the €10bn plan, Royal Schiphol Group and Future Travel Experience (2024 to 2025). WHILL autonomous service scale, WHILL (2026). Hidden Disabilities Sunflower reach, Hidden Disabilities Sunflower and Airports International (2026). Dubai and Changi initiatives, Dubai Airports, Changi Airport Group and press reports.