If two travelers had a 17-hour layover in your airport, would the news excite them? If you can’t immediately say “yes,” your airport still has work to do. We’ve got a few service and marketing tactics sites of sizes that can make the experience more appealing. Engage Before Arrival Create the travel experience before travellers pack their bags. Instagram is a good starting place. The app is praised for generating high engagement for travel brands. Use the feed to inspire travel plans, highlight features at the airport and give an otherwise impersonal industry a personal touch. Check out these travel brands that are getting it right on Instagram. Monitor Instagram and other social media platform to identify travelers. Hootsuite and other analytics services offer tools that make monitoring and filtering hashtags easier for businesses. By identifying travelers (and users with travel plans) you can open the door to a wide range of personalized, direct engagement. This human interaction builds priceless brand loyalty. For example, travelers often post updates throughout the journey, including pictures at the airport with site-specific hashtags. Your team can then connect with the use to get an idea of why they are traveling and their interests. Team members can make recommend attractions and amenities, or direct them to the welcome center for your city. Even if the user isn’t flying with you during this trip, you have created a relationship that will put you on their radar next time they book a flight. Added bonus: you’ll also make an impact on the traveler’s followers Don’t let the mobile experience stop with social media. Pulsate reports that by 2017, 10 percent of airlines revenue will be driven through mobile. That’s approximately $70 billion in revenues.  Creating a strong mobile presence will increase...

In the first quarter of 2016, ARK Development—a Racebrook portfolio company—will open The ARK at JFK, the world’s only animal-only airport terminal. Construction is now underway on the 178,000 square foot facility, which has made the news from Germany to Japan to India. Racebrook CEO John J. Cuticelli Jr. is no Dr. Dolittle – he has just one dog, a Cockapoo named Tucker, at home. But he is a savvy investor with an eye for unusual opportunities and assets, and so the concept of creating a world-leading animal handling facility, one that will see domestic pets, race horses, livestock, and perhaps the occasional zoo animal pass through its large doors, presented an appealing challenge. Cuticelli recently spoke about the project and its associated challenges. What a fascinating idea – the world’s only privately owned animal handling cargo terminal – how did you come up with it? Cuticelli: A Cornell veterinarian approached me with a document from the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey (Ed. note: a Yardi client), in which they were seeking a developer to build a 6,000 sf small animal veterinary hospital somewhere on the airport property. With my background in the airport freight business, I had some idea of the kind of animal volume that comes through the airport. Given the footprint and notoriety of JFK, my response to that was that a 6,000 square foot facility was just too small. If we wanted to make a significant contribution to animal care, it would have to be much more elaborate and fulfill the needs of the industry. That’s how it started. So what is the volume of animal traffic that passes through the airport? Cuticelli: One of the interesting things is that there’s no single place where you can...