The future of airports: Seamless, automated, and personalized
The future of airports: Seamless, automated, and personalized
https://www.mckinsey.com/featured-insights/the-next-normal/airports
Airports have existed for more than a century. New technology could help revitalize their infrastructure—for both air travelers and airport staff. In this edition of The Next Normal, we examine how innovations such as AI, biometrics, and flying taxis could transform the airport experience.
The view to 2040 and beyond
‘Your face is your new ID’
Future airports could feature less stress, shorter lines, and no more fumbling with tickets and passports. Watch as five McKinsey experts—Alastair Green, Alex Dichter, Kelly Ungerman, Steve Saxon, and Vik Krishnan—describe the airport of tomorrow.
Seamless check-in
AI and biometrics could make long airport lines a thing of the past—allowing travelers to stroll smoothly through ticketing, bag check, and security without any need for physical documents.
Personalized terminals
Imagine an airport concourse full of departure boards and wayfinding signs that recognize who you are—and can speak to you in your own language, no matter where you are in the world.
Automation ‘below the wing’
Autonomous vehicles and robotics could transform the behind-the-scenes airport operations that most travelers never see. A more efficient airport could mean better on-time performance.
More sustainable air travel
Airports are looking to reduce their environmental footprints. New infrastructure could be needed to enable more sustainable future aircraft models.
Accommodating larger passenger flows
Projections indicate that an increasing share of the world’s population will soon be able to afford air travel. Airports can prepare themselves now for heavier traffic.
An airport full of flying cars?
What if your journey began with a flying taxi picking you up in your backyard—and dropping you off on an airport runway, right next to your plane?
Readying airports for tomorrow’s travelers
Hear from three industry executives searching for ways to make airports work better for everyone, now and in the decades to come.
Executive vice president of air hub and cargo development, Changi Airport Group
“China, India, Indonesia, and the rest of Southeast Asia–I think these countries have a rising middle class and young population. So the propensity of travel will go up. I think this forms the key business case for Terminal 5 and for our developments moving forward.”
Chief financial officer, Royal Schiphol Group
“What many airports, including Schiphol, are working on is that you simply can walk through the airport without going through all the gates and the checks and stuff like that–based on biometrics, based on automatic gates. So I think it will be much more smooth, the flow will be much more natural, it will be less stressful.”
Chief strategy officer and chief accessibility officer, Abra Group
“As a blind or low-vision person, finding a restroom in an airport isn’t easy. And once I get into the restroom, it’s even harder–and it’s not somewhere you want to be just feeling around with your hands to see what’s there.”
Preparing airports for more planes and passengers
After a dramatic dip during the pandemic, global aircraft traffic has steadily recovered. By 2053, annual aircraft movements (meaning takeoffs plus landings) are expected to reach nearly 176 million—about 1.8 times more than in 2024.
That means busier airports are on the way. Today’s airport executives are planning for a future in which more planes will need to fit on runways and at gates, and more passengers—including many first-time air travelers—will need to pass through security, bag check, and boarding processes.
How Strategy Champions win
https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/strategy-and-corporate-finance/our-insights/how-strategy-champions-win
Only one in five companies believe they have high-quality strategy. What do such Strategy Champions have in common? They excel at designing bold strategies—and are even better at mobilizing their execution.
Crafting a strategy—the process of making coherent, hard-to-reverse choices under uncertainty with the aim of building long-term value—has always been demanding. In 2010, only 35 percent of more than 2,000 surveyed executives reported that their strategies passed four or more of McKinsey’s Ten Tests of Strategy (see sidebar “The Ten Tests of Strategy: Assess your strategy’s quality”).
The increasing uncertainty and complexity of the business environment have made that task even harder. The World Uncertainty Index shows baseline uncertainty more than doubling since 1990, high-uncertainty events occurring more often, and each major spike being more severe than its predecessor . The challenge of navigating uncertainty is compounded by growing complexity—from the rapid advance of AI to geopolitical tensions to the emergence of new business and operating models—that multiplies the variables that strategists must consider.
These two challenges have taken a toll on the quality of corporate strategies. In a 2024–2025 survey, only 21 percent of executives reported that their strategies passed four or more of the Ten Tests of Strategy—a 40 percent drop from a decade and a half earlier. Not surprisingly, strategists are feeling the pressure. In 2022, 42 percent of survey respondents said they were struggling to achieve the level of impact they desired.
Yet the rewards for delivering breakthrough strategies have never been greater—and neither have the penalties for getting strategy wrong. Plotting the economic profit of thousands of the world’s largest companies yields a power curve, in which the top quintile captures nearly 90 percent of all economic surplus, the bottom quintile digs a similarly large hole of value destruction, and the companies in the middle generate modest, if any, economic value (see sidebar “The Economic Profit Power Curve: Beat the market”). Successful strategy moves a company up this power curve, but the curve is growing steeper. The gap between the average gains of top-quintile outperformers and the average losses of bottom-quintile stragglers has doubled over the past two decades . In essence, the returns on great strategies and the costs of bad (or nonexistent) strategies are rising.
Only one in ten companies manages to climb from the middle to the top of the Power Curve over a decade. In this article, we share what these Strategy Champions do differently: how they design bold moves, mobilize their organizations, and sustain focused execution, even in turbulent times.
Understanding the Strategy Champions
We started with two simple questions: What do the companies that rise to the top of the Economic Profit Power Curve do differently? And how do they approach the design and delivery of their strategies? To find the answers, we studied the strategy practices and capabilities of more than 400 companies. First, we defined two groups based on their movement along the curve over five years: Strategy Champions, which moved up to or maintained top-quintile economic profit performance, and stragglers, which fell to the bottom quintile, reflecting significant strategic setbacks.
The biggest gap between Strategy Champions and stragglers is actually in mobilization—the crucial phase of translating strategic choices into organizational readiness.
Next, we compared how the champions and the stragglers approached strategy and how strong they were at strategy-related activities. Key to this was our evolved Strategy Method, which lays out 12 fundamental building blocks of strategy in three phases: design, mobilization, and execution (see sidebar “The Strategy Method: Bridge your aspiration to action”). These building blocks represent a common language for strategy activities that enabled us to systematically compare companies. We then assessed each company based on a set of capabilities that underpin the building blocks.
The results highlight a reality often missing from strategy discussions. While the data support the common refrains that strategy is about making clear choices and about execution, the biggest gap between Strategy Champions and stragglers is actually in mobilization—the crucial phase of translating strategic choices into organizational readiness.
Where Strategy Champions build their advantage
As we dug deeper, we found that Strategy Champions are, on average, stronger than stragglers at every one of the 12 building blocks. However, their strengths are particularly distinctive in several areas critical to strategy success.
Strategy design: Setting the foundation
Two building blocks in which Strategy Champions particularly outperform stragglers are in the design phase. First, they excel at aligning leadership teams on strategic imperatives by building a shared understanding of the core challenges that the company needs to address. When business leaders enter the strategy room, too often their goal is to get approval for their plans rather than to find the objectively best strategic course for the enterprise as a whole. This social side of strategy is why building a factual foundation is so critical: It ensures that everyone understands the core challenges and can debate how to best act on them.
Part of establishing that foundation is identifying the trends with the biggest impact on the business—the strength that we found most differentiates Strategy Champions from stragglers. In Jeff Bezos’s 2016 letter to shareholders, the Amazon founder called “the eager adoption of external trends” one of four essential ways to avoid disruption or complacency. He went on to explain, “If you fight [trends], you’re probably fighting the future. Embrace them and you have a tailwind.”
Another building block of design at which Strategy Champions are particularly effective is committing to a bold strategy: making coherent choices about clear strategic moves in the face of an unpredictable future. This demands strategic courage on the part of the CEO, the management team, and the board. For example, Aliko Dangote, CEO and president of Dangote Industries, West Africa’s largest company, built his success on the view that leaders need “to be the boldest people around.” His personal philosophy is “think big, dream big, and do big things.”
A high-quality strategy ultimately represents a value creation agenda that guides the allocation of resources. Unsurprisingly, Strategy Champions tend to excel at crafting compelling strategic narratives that capture their agendas (in part through their equity stories). This lays a foundation for mobilization.
Strategy mobilization: Building the bridge
Mobilization, the critical connection between design and execution, is where Strategy Champions build their most noteworthy advantage. Getting mobilization right starts with that phase’s first building block: ensuring that the right talent is fully empowered and engaged on each strategic decision. Strategy Champions are considerably better than others at making individual leaders accountable through clear targets and incentives, for ensuring that each strategic choice is mobilized and executed. Nvidia, for example, assigns a “pilot in command” to major projects and strategic decisions—the very best leader for that effort, regardless of role or seniority.
Effective mobilization further benefits from ensuring that top talent holds the roles that deliver the most strategic value, wherever these roles are in the organization, and empowering those leaders to own and drive strategy. Indeed, a study of more than 1,600 senior managers by Siemens and the University of Göttingen found that business units whose leaders felt highly empowered to implement their strategies outperformed those that didn’t.
Strategy Champions particularly stand out in the second building block of the mobilization phase: translating strategy into granular initiatives. They also excel at reallocating resources to the strategy and ensuring that the strategy is embedded into plans and budgets. In doing so, they bridge what Stanford University business professor Jeffrey Pfeffer calls “the knowing–doing gap”—systematically ensuring that short-term decisions match long-term strategy rather than letting managers revert over time to established patterns. Ultimately, Strategy Champions’ ability to effectively orchestrate the building blocks of mobilization hinges on having a fit-for-purpose operating model, which is why it’s essential to factor in future mobilization when designing strategy.
The prominence of mobilization in our research reinforces a crucial reality: Before a strategy can shape the competitive landscape, it must successfully embed itself into the DNA of the organization. As the late military and foreign policy strategist Andrew Marshall noted, “before any strategy can influence a competitor, it first has to survive your system.”
Strategy execution: Sustaining progress
Well-designed and mobilized strategies create potential; execution captures it. Within this phase, Strategy Champions particularly distinguish themselves in their ability to drive and support performance. Rather than passively tracking progress, they actively manage performance to identify and break down barriers holding back delivery and continually support the teams responsible for execution. Singapore’s DBS Bank, for example, redefined its performance management approach to enable its ambitious digital transformation strategy by tightly aligning its balanced scorecard with the strategy and defining a new digital-value-capture metric.
During execution, Strategy Champions are also stronger than other companies at testing, learning, and adapting their strategy as needed, such as by increasing the resources allocated to a strategic move or launching a new strategy design effort in pursuit of the next S-curve. These activities require having clearly documented strategic assumptions and rationales for each choice made during strategy design. One CEO instilled the practice of the leadership team articulating to the board the assumptions underlying their strategic commitments. This forced business leaders to acknowledge and reconcile different beliefs, laying the foundation for efficient testing and learning every six months during execution.
While Strategy Champions are, on average, stronger than peers across all the building blocks and the underlying capabilities in the Strategy Method, their deepest strengths vary in important ways based on the context they face. This is a significant advantage in today’s extremely uncertain environment.
Different contexts call for different strengths
Aside from analyzing 400 companies’ strategy capabilities, we assessed how they factored in a powerful external element: the level of uncertainty (see sidebar “Strategy under uncertainty: Understand the future”). The results demonstrate that strategy capabilities work together as a system: Strategy Champions aren’t just stronger than others at strategy overall; they have the right strengths for the level of uncertainty that they face.
These findings reinforce the fact that different contexts require different playbooks. Yet in our experience, few companies consciously make such adaptations. Many continue with their established approaches rather than identifying strategy capabilities to strengthen or build. Organizations accustomed to stable markets that suddenly face disruption often need to develop new strategy muscles.
Mastering the craft of strategy
How can an organization that aspires to become a Strategy Champion improve its strategy capabilities? It should start with setting clear, shared standards for strategy. Our survey shows that stragglers are nearly twice as likely as Strategy Champions to have little or no agreement about what constitutes high-quality strategy. This matches our experience: Strategy is an often-misunderstood concept, and the lack of understanding results in unproductive debates and flawed decision-making.
Some leading companies have established bespoke approaches to promoting the strategic thinking that they seek. Amazon, for example, distinguishes between “Type 1” decisions (those that are irreversible or nearly so) and “Type 2” decisions (those with relatively short-term consequences) when allocating management attention, and its practice of the six-page memo stresses clear thinking. Mercado Libre, meanwhile, uses a 90–10 system that fully empowers leaders to make most decisions, with the expectation that the 10 percent of decisions that involve high stakes and are irreversible are managed collaboratively. Such shared understanding fosters speed: Strategy Champions are 1.7 times more likely than stragglers to consistently make strategic decisions at the right speed.
Commitment to strategy excellence also has a financial dimension. Strategy Champions are twice as likely as stragglers to have budgets that are dedicated to improving their strategy capabilities and one-third more likely to have full executive-team support for investing in those capabilities. The growing frequency of external shocks and the increasing importance of AI in strategy development make such capabilities critical.
As an organization’s chief strategist, the CEO is essential to focusing attention on strategy. The experience of Rolls-Royce under CEO Tufan Erginbilgiç illustrates the cultural reset that this may require. Facing significant performance challenges, Erginbilgiç launched a strategic review framed around making clear choices. He involved around 500 leaders in what he described as a necessarily “chaotic” process. “Because you’re making choices in the room, by the time you’re done with strategy, the whole organization is aligned,” he told us. The process didn’t just change Rolls-Royce’s strategic direction but aligned minds on what high-quality strategy means and requires.
The aim of strategy has always been to make hard choices under uncertainty to unlock exceptional results. But our research and experience have revealed something that many companies miss: Strategy Champions have both brilliant visions and the right set of strengths to bring them to life. They embrace all 12 building blocks of the Strategy Method, from design to mobilization to execution. In today’s tough game with high stakes, mastering the craft of strategy is the bridge to becoming a Strategy Champion.
Hotels are investing vast sums in AI and other tech. This human element is as crucial.
https://hotelsmag.com/news/hotels-are-investing-in-everything-to-boost-revenue-heres-the-one-thing-that-might-be-missing
2025 has been an interesting year for hotel industry performance: U.S. profitability dipped for the second straight year; Europe and Asia have been stagnant; the Middle East is growing slightly. A wide array of factors have influenced operational costs, guest demand levels and rates.
Years ago, when I was reviewing and approving hotel budgets, I would not accept anything less than 5% year on year as we would need to cover inflation, and generate more revenue to appease the hotel owner. That typically remains the norm, but if your whole market, city and comp set are barely managing to stay even, what can you do to get to the desired growth levels?
As hotels continue to evolve in every way to meet service standards while facing operational issues, investing in key business areas is crucial for growth. However, this it is not a one-size-fits-all approach.
Technology is available to help hotels stay ahead of the curve. Of course, artificial intelligence, from chatbots to revenue management platforms, is now ubiquitous and being employed at property level. The world is moving forward and operators need to keep up, but doing so in a composed manner that doesn’t result in overspending or adding on too many tools that overwhelm teams. Consider this: If a hotel is on the smaller size, a property-built tech stack driving online distribution and conversion, whether direct or through third parties, should do the trick. Meanwhile, larger, more complicated hotels, is where good old-fashioned sales comes in. Without a solid base to your business levels, it doesn’t matter how much technology and AI you throw at the growth problem. It simply won’t do: You need a base off which to yield; you need different source markets to cover all seasons and days of the week, meetings to fill up those spaces and for them to go and eat lunch in your all-day dining; you need leisure clients to use your wellness facilities and business travelers to buy your executive rooms while entertaining clients with food and drinks at night. A wide range of clients is needed to make a hotel’s business both resilient and optimized for maximum revenue potential.
Globally, the size of sales and events teams has been shrinking in recent years, a global trend driven by the declining share of business they’ve contributed in recent years, along with the rise of high-yielding direct online bookings. But your sales team could be a silver lining, now more than ever. You need salespeople at the top of their game, hunting for leads, developing client relationships, maximizing market share and growing the conversion ratios from all the leads that are coming in. The problem is that many of these teams are understaffed, overworked, undertrained and outgunned by their clients.
The clients that they talk to, whether corporate, leisure, MICE, government, airlines or any other, are far sharper than they were five, 10 or 20 years ago. They are more experienced and have way more choices of destinations and hotels and have access to information that they will use to get what they want. Your clients are harder to catch, harder to keep and harder to please than ever before.
Many salespeople are acting as order takers, budget asking, answering machines, system administrators and proposal sending admins. Because of the constant pressure on them to perform, the many demands on their time, their lack of experience in many cases and also a reduced investment in training, they do not know how to set their priorities right, don’t build rapport in the right way, don’t qualify clients effectively and, as such, end up being less successful.
Investing in this area of business, giving them support, ensuring they are trained and rewarded properly when they exceed expectations, could make a huge difference to your hotel’s commercial success. This, along with your tech stack, will push your numbers higher than your comp set and guarantee that, even if your whole market collapses, your hotel will always outperform others around you.
DUHC&S | Strategic Hospitality Consulting & Advisory
We transform hospitality and tourism businesses through strategic solutions, operational efficiency, and comprehensive renovation. With over 40 years of experience working with brands like Hilton, Hyatt, Sheraton, and Sonesta, we enhance asset value and profitability through:
*Operational excellence and brand standards (GSI +90%)
*Market penetration and commercial strategies
*Key partnerships and disruptive innovation
*Hotel openings and repositioning
Proven results :
✅ 48% GOP |
✅ +120% asset valuation growth
✅ Successful projects across 6 Latin American countries
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