On February 1, 2017, DFW became the first airport in the world to introduce an airport-wide mobile food ordering program through its own official mobile app.
With this newest feature, travelers can pre-order their next hot meal and pick it up at over 30 mobile ordering enabled restaurants inside the terminals.
With over 280,000 downloads and 20,000 active users, DFW saw the opportunity of offering made-to-order meals for its customers. In partnership with Grab, a leading mobile food ordering app for airports and with DFW's current app developer, Amsterdam-based M2Mobi, the two developers began to integrate food ordering capabilities within DFW's app.
Users can order food directly from a list of restaurants with the green 'mobile ordering' icon. From there, users can choose from menu options, modify their order to their liking and pay in advance. Once an order is placed, the user receives a text confirmation and is provided interactive map directions to the restaurant's pick up area.
Mobile food ordering offers the passengers the convenience of enjoying a delicious meal before their flight while also having plenty of time to travel to their gate.
Goals for this project are:
With Grab's SDK available, M2Mobi was able to create a new app environment into DFW's existing app. It allowed DFW to customize the environment to adhere to DFW's brand standards and most importantly, incorporate a seamless user experience.
With collaboration between the Marketing, Concessions and ITS departments, the entire project took 6 months to implement. The first phase included design, development and implementation. The second phase required in depth quality assurance testing and training for restaurant staff.
Restaurant staff training consisted of online training videos, program FAQ sheets, customer interaction scripts and weekly meetings with managers to properly train for the program. Members from Marketing and Concessions field tested different restaurants to see if restaurants were following all program requirements correctly.
After the initial launch in February, internal departments offered assistance in testing the new feature and provided feedback to help improve the program. This helped improve not only the mobile app experience but the experience for passengers at the mobile food ordering enabled restaurants due to additional testing and orders.
After 3 months of usability testing and training of staff to understand the new program, an official communications announcement was released on May 21, 2017. A general awareness campaign was launched on Airport property and select online outlets, helping to promote the benefits of mobile food ordering to customers.
Adoption was a bit slow at first, however with the promotional campaign; the new program began to establish regular daily users. Transactions are 60% travelers and 40% employees with a total of 1700 orders to date.
App downloads during launch month significantly increased by 283%, with mostly iOS usage. To date, there are a total of 280,000 mobile app downloads.
