Travel Demand, Rising Expectations

Global air travel is setting new records. After a 10.6% surge in passenger traffic last year, IATA forecasts another 5.8% increase in 2025, making this another record year and fuelling demand for airport lounges and other premium travel services.

But as travel costs rise and passengers spend more, they expect more in return. They’ve grown accustomed to convenience, personalisation, and high-quality services. And they expect the same from air travel. 

Before they ever set foot in an airport, they’ve already compared reviews and ratings to find the venues most likely to deliver. To compete, travel brands must excel in three areas:

• Discoverability: Showing up in Google Search, Google and Apple Maps, and AI recommendations like ChatGPT – all the places travellers start their journeys.
  
• Credibility: Ensuring that ratings, reviews, and AI summaries accurately reflect the experience your brand delivers.
  
• Actionability: Applying AI analytics to transform feedback from multiple sources into measurable actions that drive improvement.

Together, these three elements comprise modern reputation management, connecting how travellers discover, experience, and remember your brand.

Reputation as a Business Metric

When experiences in airport lounges fall short, passengers post about them on Google, TripAdvisor, or Trustpilot. Poor reviews can negatively influence search rankings as well as the AI-generated summaries travellers increasingly rely on. With both types of search now shaping discovery, feedback is more important than ever. 

Lounges that act quickly protect their brand’s visibility. And every improvement in experience – shorter queues, faster service, better amenities – appears online, influencing how travellers spend and airports grow. Those that don’t respond quickly risk obscurity.

As such, reputation management has become the frontline of competition, directly influencing bookings and revenue growth. McKinsey research shows that customer experience leaders often generate twice the revenue growth of their peers.

For some travel brands, reputation goes beyond passenger choice. Unlike airlines, which passengers readily switch between, airports typically operate as regional monopolies. They don’t compete for passengers directly – they compete for credibility with regulators, airlines, and retail partners. 

In that environment, public ratings and industry benchmarks like Airport Service Quality (ASQ) become the true currency of reputation, offering a clear measure of service excellence. Strong scores help justify fee structures, attract new routes, and secure top-tier concession brands. 

SSP: Strengthening Feedback and Visibility

SSP operates food and beverage brands across airports worldwide, serving millions of passengers each year. Managing customer feedback at this scale is complex, with comments and reviews coming from many different channels.

Partnering with Reputation helped SSP streamline how insights are gathered and understood. The collaboration has led to higher review volume, faster response times, and stronger customer engagement.

Reputation’s unified platform gives global operators like SSP a single source of truth for customer sentiment – centralising reviews, survey data, and other feedback so teams can identify patterns faster and act with confidence.

Today, SSP views reputation performance as a key driver of visibility and passenger trust, using feedback insights to guide ongoing service improvements across its global operations.

London Luton Airport: Connecting ASQ With Real-Time Feedback

London Luton Airport serves more than 16 million passengers a year. Like many airports, it relied on the ASQ programme to benchmark passenger satisfaction. ASQ is widely considered the industry’s gold standard, but the surveys are broad and periodic, making it difficult to uncover specific issues.

By partnering with Reputation, Luton connected ASQ results with live passenger feedback through the reputation management platform. Today, insights are centralised in a single dashboard, giving teams a clearer understanding of the passenger journey across touchpoints.

Reputation’s new AI Reputation Manager now gives airports like Luton the ability to see how they appear in AI-driven search results such as Google AI Overviews, ensuring that ratings and guest feedback are accurately represented where travellers are searching.

The combination of ASQ benchmarking, real-time passenger sentiment, and access to AI-powered insight tools gives airports the ability to act faster, identify emerging issues, and demonstrate to regulators, airlines, and partners a unified measure of performance. It’s a model for how airports can close the guest feedback gap and turn insight into action across every stage of the journey.

Airport Service Quality: The Global Benchmark for Passenger Experience

Run by Airports Council International (ACI), the ASQ programme measures passenger satisfaction across key stages of the airport journey – from security wait times to retail and lounge experiences. It remains the definitive global benchmark for airport service performance.

However, ASQ data alone can feel broad, making it hard to pinpoint the root causes that drive a score up or down. That’s why airports are now pairing ASQ with Reputation’s platform –  combining structured survey data with real-time passenger reviews, social feedback, and concession-level insights.

Together, ASQ and Reputation give airports a unified picture: the credibility of ASQ benchmarks, plus the day-to-day visibility to act on what travellers are actually saying. That combination turns feedback into both an external proof point and an internal performance driver.

No1 Lounges: Setting the Standard for Premium Experiences

No1 Lounges, the award-winning provider of premium airport spaces across the UK, is known for combining comfort, efficiency, and service that justifies a premium price.

Partnering with Reputation has helped the brand measure and manage guest experience performance across its locations. With a unified view of guest feedback and sentiment, No1 Lounges can identify what delights travellers and where improvements will matter most.

This focus on reputation performance supports No1 Lounges’ long-standing commitment to exceptional service, ensuring every visit feels valued, consistent, and worth returning for.

Across the travel industry, brands like No1 Lounges are increasingly using AI-powered sentiment analysis to surface emerging guest themes faster and ensure a consistent experience across multiple locations. With Reputation’s platform built for multi-location visibility and insight, operators can connect real-time feedback to operational decisions, strengthening service quality, brand perception, and traveller loyalty.

5 Ways Travel Brands Strengthen Performance Through Reputation Management

1. Boost Discoverability with Reviews + Listings

Most passengers start their journey online, comparing airports, lounges, or services before they book. Accurate listings and strong review profiles help determine whether your brand shows up in search results, map apps, or aggregator sites. Managing both together drives visibility, improves rankings, and builds trust with travellers deciding where to spend.

2. Safeguard Visibility in AI Search

Generative AI tools like Google AI Overviews and ChatGPT now shape how travellers discover and compare airport experiences. If your brand isn’t represented accurately, misinformation or negative sentiment can reach thousands instantly.

AI Reputation Manager monitors how lounges and airports appear in these AI-generated results, surfacing inaccurate or missing details and highlighting perception shifts in real time. This gives operators a chance to correct the record and ensure that what travellers see in AI summaries matches the experience they’ll actually get.

3. Understand Passenger Sentiment with Surveys + AI Insights

Surveys have evolved from static questionnaires into dynamic insight engines. When paired with reviews, social feedback, and AI analytics, they reveal not just what passengers say – but why they feel that way, helping teams capture and act on a unified view of sentiment.

Item-Level Feedback delves even deeper, revealing which specific menu items, interactions, or aspects of the experience are driving satisfaction or complaints. Here, patterns emerge faster, enabling teams to identify the root causes of issues – before they affect scores or revenue.

4. Benchmark and Compete with Reputation Score + Competitive Insights

Executives and regulators alike want proof of performance. Reputation Score provides a single metric that reflects the overall health of your brand across reviews, ratings, and responsiveness – easy to understand, track, and improve.

Paired with Competitive Insights, the platform shows how you stack up against peers in your region or sector, where rivals are outperforming, and where your opportunities lie. Together, they transform reputation into a clear business KPI that boards, investors, and partners value.

5. Turn Insights Into Action

Listening is only half the battle. Acting on feedback is where real gains happen. Reputation®IQ gives teams a conversational way to explore millions of feedback points – asking plain English questions and getting instant, data-driven answers that surface hidden themes, root causes, and performance patterns. Unlike traditional dashboards, RepIQ democratises insight – enabling teams across marketing, operations, and CX to uncover what matters most and act without waiting for analyst support.

Customer Journey Insights complements this by mapping feedback across the entire passenger journey – from parking and security to lounges and concessions – showing exactly where to improve. The result: faster fixes, smarter resource allocation, and the ability to prove how reputation improvements translate into bookings and spend.

Using Reputation Management to Drive Growth

In an industry where passengers compare options instantly, reputation management has become a performance metric tied directly to revenue. For airports and lounges, visibility in search, accuracy in AI-generated summaries, and credibility across review platforms define whether travellers choose you or look elsewhere.

That’s why leading operators are unifying ASQ benchmarks with real-time passenger feedback, AI-powered analytics, and competitive intelligence. The result isn’t just higher ratings – it’s stronger performance data for businesses, regulators, partners, and passengers alike.

Reputation brings these pieces together in one platform, helping travel brands turn insight into action and reputation into growth.

In the age of AI, the brands that win aren’t just the most visible – they’re the most trusted, responsive, and consistent across every traveller touchpoint. See how Reputation can help your airport or lounge outperform. Book a demo today.