Name a place where more people pass in and out than a public airport – we’ll wait. The reality of public airports, especially those located in or near major metropolitan areas, is that hundreds of thousands of travelers pass through every day. This pretty much guarantees that almost every surface is a high touchpoint surface and every area is a high traffic area, and this is both troublesome news for public health as well as a gigantic burden for airport maintenance staff.
As travel has picked back up around the globe and because we’ve collectively heightened the importance of clean and safe public places, many public airports around the world have been found to be struggling to keep up with cleaning high touchpoint surfaces. Sadly, some have (after investigations, such as John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York City) skipped cleaning these sensitive areas altogether. Wherever on the scale of clean your maintenance staff falls, here are 5 high traffic touchpoints to keep in mind:
Check-In
If you think about the common traveler’s path through an airport, from arrival to boarding an aircraft, the first area of concern is each terminal’s check-in. From the entry doors to the seating benches, check-in countertops (and self check-in stations), and everything in between, an airport’s check-in areas are the first section saturated with high traffic touchpoints. Remember (airports, people tired, etc)
Security
Immediately after the check-in areas come the security lines. As we all know, this is where travelers are bottlenecked into several single file lines, and are required to both remove certain personal items and clothing as well as separate baggage and its contents. The strict systematic process of almost every airport’s security check generates a long list of high traffic touchpoints. These include all major surfaces in the security area, communal bins, line rope barriers, tables, benches, chairs, and more.
Food Courts
Airport food courts and their high traffic touchpoints are especially important to consider given they’re where a good portion of travelers consume food and beverage, which demands the highest priority of cleanliness. Attention-to-detail is critical, because high traffic touchpoints vary from large, scarce fixtures like garbage bins with tray return shelves, to small, abundant items like food trays and utensils.
Bathrooms
Bathrooms, due to their purpose, accommodate a unique importance to cleaning. Without getting into unsavory details, let’s go ahead and extend the same attention to all high traffic touchpoints in airport bathrooms from top to bottom (literally every inch of surface area, cool?).
Gates
Gate areas within airports present a strange burden to the cleaning of high traffic touchpoints. The previous areas discussed boast high traffic touchpoints that stem from both forced and optional processes for every traveler. Once travelers arrive at their gate and await boarding, they tend to relax. Coming to such a stop means any gate’s high traffic touchpoints are where travelers can sit, lean, rest their travel items, or otherwise stay busy until their flight boards.
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