In July last year, Heathrow welcomed more than 7.53 million passengers, up 1.2% when compared to July 2016. Averaging 243,000 passengers every day. The family-focused airport turned their attention to enhancing customer experience within the airport, ensuring that even the tiniest travellers had the most enjoyable journey possible.
Heathrow embraced augmented reality technology for the first time, partnering with UK-based Ads Reality, to create the Around the World with Mr. Adventure free app. Children and parents could pose and take pictures with the characters, by scanning markers that are placed in each terminal, on their smartphones.
Ads Reality’s technology needed to highlight how many times the app was downloaded, how many markers in each terminal were triggered by users, which terminal had the most interactions, and how users shared the experiences on social media. The campaign resulted in impressive engagement results which superseded initial targets; over 3,600 travellers downloaded the app across Android and IOS devices and spent almost 800 hours engaging with the app during the first month.
“We’re delighted that Heathrow has seen first-hand the value immersive technology like augmented reality can have on improving customer experience,” said Richard Corps, MD & co-founder of Ads Reality.
“Not only was this a fun initiative for passengers, but it now also arms Heathrow with useful insights for the future. We look forward to partnering again and showing what more can be done with augmented reality.”
Iona Harper, Senior Experience Manager at Heathrow, said: “We were pleased that the Mr. Adventure app was a hit with the families travelling with us this summer. By using exciting, innovative technology it allowed us to do something unique, which certainly provided hours of fun for our passengers.”
The campaign recently won an award for the Most Effective Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality Campaign at the Mobile Marketing Awards.
