While the travel industry was sent reeling from the COVID-19 pandemic over the past year, the team at Archetype SC also took a hit to the momentum it had build throughout 2019 with the successful expansion of our A2 Analytics product, a revolutionary location-based tracking platform.

But while we counted down the days, weeks and months until the inevitable return to business, our development team stayed busier than ever, making sure that our product would be ready to take off when airport traffic returned full force in 2021.

---

"Never let a serious crisis go to waste. And what I mean by that it's an opportunity to do things you think you could not do before."

— Rahm Emanuel, Former Chicago Mayor

---

Taking this advice to heart, Archetype SC used the past year as an opportunity to enhance A2 Analytics all around, from improved accuracy, monitoring and data quality enhancements to larger features such as the addition of journey mapping features, improved scalability and more comprehensive reporting.

Here's a look at what's new with A2 Analytics for 2021:

Journey Mapping

In a post-COVID world, understanding exactly how customers move through your facility in more important than ever. From ensuring distancing and capacity guidelines are met to knowing which areas need sanitized and when, getting a clear picture of travelers exact journeys is key.

Thanks to added Journey Mapping features of A2 Analytics, our system can now use its advanced algorithm-driven protocols to produce Sankey charts that provide insights into foot-traffic flow throughout the airport campus.  By identifying where customers are likely to proceed next from a given location facilities can better manage everything from cleaning to staffing to where to place amenities such as ATMs, bathrooms and concessions.

This new capability is available as a result of improved data formats that we’ve developed in conjunction with various other improvements over the past year.

Scalability

By participating in the SEC-AAAE conference in Savannah in March, our team had the unique opportunity to track conference attendees and test out new protocols for data collection, which has led to great improvements in our ability to handle data loads. Thanks to our extensive testing and honing of the system, as our A2 implementations begin to expand to larger airports our system is now equipped to scale and handle the load these facilities require.

In fact, during just the past few months alone, we've been able to amp up our monitoring and tracking capabilities to comfortably handle more than 10 times that data throughout of our previous version and plan to deploy this updated platform to a number of medium-to-large sized airports by the end of 2021.

Improved Reporting

In addition to improvements to the A2 Analytics system, hardware and software behind its cutting-edge processing algorithms, we've also worked to improve the reporting side of A2, making it even easier for those managing a facility to get the key insights they need for data-driven decision making.

Added to our suite of ready-made reports are features that allows users to see where the "hotspots" in customer activity are in their facility over time.

We've also created what we call a Throughput report, which is designed to give users a quick overview of the traffic in a specific area. This report shows data for daily, weekly, monthly and yearly periods and allows facilities the ability to make decisions about staffing, gate/lane openings and helps them prepare for future influxes of traffic.

Of course, every A2 implementation also comes with the ability to have the Archetype SC craft custom reports catered to your specific business needs.

As leisure travel returns to prominence throughout 2021, ramping up safety and security measures around COVID-19 guidelines will be a critical activity for airports.

In the fight against the Coronavirus, location-based analytics will be a valuable tool for ensuring the safety of passengers, staff, and contractors that make use of your facility. While helping fight the spread of the virus will be done through safety protocols like wearing a face covering, the impact of creating social distancing within your facility will also be a critical factor.

Ensuring passengers have enough space through floor markings and deliberately spaced queues does not provide a holistic look into where people are at a given time.

Those floor coverings act as suggestions that should be maintained and utilized by the public, but a real-time solution tracking movement by individuals will allow for more accurate information into the spacing and movement in your facility.

How Location-Based Analytics Can Help

Utilizing location-based analytics, like Archetype SC’s A2 Analytics, unlocks the power of real-time analysis of the movement within a given space. It can answer questions like:

• Is the spacing within the TSA line being followed?
• How many people are in the restroom and is that number higher than regulations allow?
• Are people adhering to the closure of certain seating areas to allow for distancing?

Protecting passengers, staff, and contractors is an endeavor that will take an abundance of caution and preparation.

Using digital measures, like location-based analytics, can help prevent business interruptions by identifying areas in which an infected person frequented to focus on cleaning efforts, monitoring of zones to target congested areas for dispersal, and ensuring arrivals and departures are spaced to avoid close contact situations.

Implementing a low cost, low impact solution like A2 Analytics will provide your facility with peace of mind during trying times.

Making the move to using location-based analytics can be a big decision for your business.

On one hand, using this technology can unlock powerful insights.

Knowing how people move through your facility, how long they are there, and where they came from provides you with critical information to improve the customer experience and become more efficent in your operations.

On the other hand, tracking your customers’ movements can open your business up a whole new set of decisions about how to use and collect user data.

With new regulations about consumer data privacy, knowing what’s allowed — and what’s right — when it comes to collecting data can be confusing.

By opting to use A2 Analytics from Archetype SC, for location-based tracking and insights you can avoid these concerns. Here’s a look at how our technology compares to most when it comes to data privacy:

How most technologies use data

Whenever a consumer downloads a new app or signs up for a service, businesses put terms and conditions in place to cover all their bases in a legal sense.

For many applications and technologies, this giant wall of text states that the consumer will have data entrusted to the company, including some Personally Identifiable Information (PII) that the company owns and can do with it what they want.

Most consumers breeze right through the terms and conditions, scrolling to click “Agree” without taking the time to fully understand what they’re subjected to in exchange for the service.

Because the company owns their data, these consumers may have PII, location data, or anything gleaned from their device sold by the service they use.

How data privacy is changing

With regulations like GDPR and the California Consumer Privacy Act going into efffect in recent years, consumers are more in tune than ever with how companies use their data.

For businesses not in compliance, there are heavy penalties and sanctions that force the issue of data privacy to be at the forefront of dealings with consumers.

Thanks to these actions, users are becoming more likely opt out of having their data shared, and are now aware that they have the right to see what a company has done with their information.

Even as businesses move to update privacy policies and introduce more transparency in their data usage, many — including those in the location-based tracking space — have been slow to adapt.

How A2 Analytics handles data privacy

A2 Analytics uses passive sensors to pinpoint devices within a given area, but does not capture any Personally Identifiable Information (PII) in the process.

Using location data, combined with cloud computing and machine-learning algorythms, A2 Analytics gives a holistic look at the movement of people via the signals put off by their devices.

It cannot, however, capture information like phone numbers, contact information, or any other associated information about the owner of the signal.

Because A2 Analytics uses anonymized data, it is able to provide insights about the movement of individuals in a facility without the need for opt-in or an app on the users devices. This allows for higher capture rates, typically above 85% of all individuals in the space.

This high capture rate allows for highly accurate information about your space with minimal impact on an audience.