Envisioning a customer-friendly terminal experience

As the second largest UK carrier, Virgin Atlantic has negotiated the lion’s share of Terminal 3 and Foster’s redevelopment of the fabric of the building gives Virgin an opportunity to reinvent the service experiences of their customers before and after the flight.

As innovators in their sector, Virgin Atlantic’s Service Design team looks for imaginative thinking and asked Engine to envision the future Terminal 3 Experience. Services can’t be designed without an understanding of who will be using them – their expectations, needs and behaviour. We interviewed passengers, shadowed travellers throughout the airport, and gleaned views and anecdotes from Virgin Atlantic staff.

With this research we developed a set of service principles that would guide our creation of a customer experience for the terminal. In addition to being rooted in passenger insight, the principles reflected the requirements of the Virgin Atlantic brand and an understanding of the architecture and the operational issues behind the scenes helped us to apply the service principles in a practical way.

Working closely with Virgin’s marketing team we generated a range of service themes and innovative ‘service features’ to enable Virgin to get the most value out of the space - and to ensure service envy from other airlines’ passengers. To help drive Virgin’s internal decision making process, we constructed passenger journeys as storyboards and scripts to both validate and communicate a service vision. These visualisations have proved so successful that they are now used to direct Virgin’s design teams and to communicate what they want to achieve for passengers in their ongoing negotiations with the architects and the airport authority.