Copenhagen Optimization Upgrades Airport Experiences

Picture: Copenhagen Airport

One of the most dreaded stages of any trip is the airport transit: queues, stress, anxiety...

Luckily this Danish startup thinks it can be fixed...or, at the very least, mitigated!

While crowds are, generally speaking, a bad thing when it comes to using a public service, they also generate lots of data, and data is what Copenhagen Optimization is good at.

Most organizations collect tons of data about their users, but most often than not they do not find any beneficial use for it. This is when Copenhagen Optimization comes into play.

Founded in 2014 by two Danish maths wizzards, this startup is already working with some of Europe's majors airports (London Heathrow, Dublin, Copenhagen and Geneva airports are among its clients), getting to a €700k turnover last year and growing to a team of 16 people.

What Copenhagen Optimization does is, basically, cloud-based software that helps airports streamling their operations through big data analysis. 

With this aim they collect data from multiple "touch-points" and sources, for example, the scanners at security control, that keep records of their activity. What happens now is that most of the data that is generated is given no use at all. 

For example, it is possible to forecast how many people will turn up at the airport on a given date and time, therefore giving enough advance warning time to the airport managers to staff appropriately some bottlenecks, such as security control, and improve the efficienty of airport operations and, most importantly for the majority of us...the passenger experience!