Heathrow: Reserve & Collect Service becomes Omnichannel Heathrow Boutique

With 78 million passengers annually and 76,000 employees, Heathrow Airport is Europe’s largest airport. Like all airports, Heathrow has to deal with the changing shopping habits of its passengers – especially since the non-aviation business is becoming increasingly important. In order to meet the new customer requirements, Heathrow’s goal was to replace the existing Reserve & Collect system with a sophisticated, digital marketplace that combines flight information, shopping and airport services on a single platform. With customer-friendly processes, the airport is successful in creating high-end E-Commerce for over 300 luxury brands in the Heathrow Boutique.

• Digital marketplace with a focus on premium products
• Interaction with passengers, personalised offers and marketing
• Seamless digital omnichannel commerce customer experience
• Automated order management and fulfillment processes
• Scalable, future-proof and expandable enterprise platform

The new digital marketplace was to replace the existing Reserve & Collect system, with Heathrow placing great emphasis on a scalable and future-proof solution with significantly reduced maintenance and automated processes. It was also important to integrate flight information as well as existing and future retailers, products and airport services such as personal shoppers or Collect on Return. Other requirements included simplified product maintenance, solutions for fulfillment, order management and payment. As a first step, the existing Reserve & Collect system was migrated to AOE’s new digital OM³ marketplace during ongoing operations, including products, merchants and processes, without any obvious interruptions for passengers. 

The Heathrow Boutique is an important element in the overall strategy to digitalize the airport's non-aviation revenues. With the successful launch of the OM³ platform, Heathrow now has a powerful and sustainable digital marketplace that meets modern requirements and customer demands and can be continuously expanded. The scalable solution uses automated processes in product maintenance, order management and fulfillment, reducing manual effort for Heathrow and its retailers. The marketplace offers passengers all necessary flight data, airport services, shops and products on one platform. Thanks to attractive premium products and targeted marketing campaigns, the solution has met with widespread acceptance by passengers.