Holiday seasons push Indian airports to their peak.
In October 2024, Mumbai’s Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Airport handled 4.42 million passengers and set a record for overall movements of aircraft. Congestion, delays and stress are inevitable consequences of passenger surges and are almost unavoidable unless technology preemptively identifies and counteracts them.
Smart airports do not solely scale infrastructure, but detect patterns, respond in real time and respond to passengers. This blog explores how AI-driven technology enables ops teams to tackle Diwali rush.
The Holiday Surge & Why It Matters
The Holiday Surge and Why It Matters
Holiday surges frequently indicate a 20-30% increase in passenger levels. Airports that approach this as “just another busy day” risk the potential for cascading delays.
These delays occur not only during check-in and security, but across touchpoints including baggage handling, gate assignments, and boarding. This in turn results in missed slots, scrambling passengers, unmanageable queues and reputation damage. The smarter airports prepare for this seasonal surge in advance proactively, instead of simply reacting to chaos.
How Smart Airports Manage Surges
Smart crowd management requires a combination of forecasting demand, automation, real-time visibility, and communications. Here’s how:
Forecast the demand: Airports can predict when and where surges will occur by analysing historical data and statistically examining flight bookings and signals in the external environment (i.e., festival days or travel trends). This enables airports to open counters, roster staff and allocate resources ahead of time.
Automated service: Self-check-in kiosks, automated bag-drop and inline baggage screening facilitate reduced dependency on manual counters, which can act as a relief point for airports when volume spikes.
Real time monitoring: Alerts are issued once threshold limits are aligned via IoT sensors (length of queue, occupancy of space), video analytics with computer vision and passenger processing. Airport operators can instantly divert flows and streamline workflows.
Dynamic resource allocation: Staff, screening lanes and gates can be dynamically deployed as required instead of being assigned to a particular designated check point.
When all of these aspects work in tandem and power informed decisions altogether, seasonal surges do not become unmanageable large system breakdowns. This eliminates scope for delays and reduces friction for passengers.
The global market for IoT in aviation is anticipated to have a CAGR of 21.7% through 2034. In 2023, the aviation cloud market was around USD 6.19 billion, with ~12.5% projected growth to 2030. These statistics show that the tools to manage Diwali-level surges already exist, and early adopters are gaining measurable advantage.
Conclusion
Diwali and seasonal festive surges are unavoidable, but congestion and frustration are not. Airports willing to invest in forecasting, automation, sensing and adaptive control will transform even the toughest days into the best examples of effectiveness. At WAISL, we power technology that is built for smart airports. Ready for a digital transformation? Contact us to know more.
