"From flight information and booking to entry and customs regulations to convenient online parking searches, all services can be accessed both on mobile and desktop devices. Nuremberg was also the first airport in Germany that allows customers to access service information via Amazon's digital assistant."
Christian Albrecht
Head of Communications
About Airport Nuremberg
The Albrecht Dürer Airport in Nuremberg is the international airport of the Nuremberg metropolitan region and Bavaria's second largest airport. Operated by Flughafen Nürnberg GmbH, the airport handles around 3.4 million passengers annually. The airport has won the prestigious "Business Traveller Award" several times as the best German airport and is constantly working to improve its service quality even further. Providing a personalized service to all passengers is a top priority.
Context
The airport’s websites were to run on a future-proof and highly available platform that would allow the easy and secure integration of services such as up-to-date flight information, entry and customs regulations, a parking booking system or SMS flight information.
This would provide guests with the best customer service and significantly enhance the digital experience. A core requirement was to ensure the reliability of the services delivered, especially during peak periods when the number of site users can quickly multiply.
The platform needed to seamlessly integrate with all departments and allow editors to deliver the content and functionality required by users in a simple and economical way.
Solution
Nuremberg Airport's website was implemented on JustRelate's Digital Experience Platform in 2011. The solution is operated in the Amazon Web Services Cloud which is highly secure and can scale automatically. Other projects included "nue4agents", a website specifically for travel agencies, and "airpart", a website for a subsidiary of the airport that operates all ground handling services. The widgets developed as part of the project include car rental bookings, SMS messaging, webcams and weather forecasts – mostly in real time – and can be arranged and changed as quickly and effortlessly as other design elements and editorial content. The Alexa skill allows passengers to conveniently check flight connections or request travel information via voice control.
Results
Thanks to the digital experience platform in the cloud, Nuremberg airport no longer needs to run its own IT infrastructure or data center. The scalability of the cloud architecture results in 99.99% global availability in the CDN. This is an essential requirement, especially for airports that often have to deal with unpredictable load peaks due to exceptional circumstances such as adverse weather or strikes. The 24/365 monitoring ensures dynamic scaling under load. This means the airport can keep travelers and visitors well informed – even in the event of a crisis. Due to the cloud infrastructure, the airport is able to operate its modern and powerful platform and the highly dynamic websites in a very cost-efficient way. Dr. Michael Hupe, Managing Director of Nuremberg Airport: "The combination of a comprehensive solution from AWS and JustRelate proved to be particularly suitable for our requirements. We have a flexible and scalable infrastructure and we save an estimated 60-70% compared to our previous web hosting costs."
