Waiting for a flight has its joys – and it’s challenges. Sometimes it’s finding a seat, other times waiting in line, and the experience almost always involving an element of being hungry. And that’s when it starts all over again, with the need to stand in line, lose a seat and find food.
Thanks to apps, technology and airports embracing the future – that’s finally changing.
Seattle Tacoma Airport (SEATAC) is going a bit further than other mobile airport food ordering platforms, launching mobile food ordering and gate delivery, allowing people to camp out in comfort, and let the yum-yum come to them.
Airport Food Delivery
It’s almost hard to imagine life before the likes of DoorDash, UberEats and Grubhub. Being able to enjoy all the delights of take out, without ever having to go out – is pretty life changing.
Now, a platform called Servy is bringing that joy to airports too. The same concept that brought skip the queue airport ordering to more than 66 airports around the world is now expanding to delivery at SEATAC, the Seattle Tacoma Airport, among others.
Even better, some meals at Seattle Airport will be delivered by robot, named Gita.
orderSEA is the new app and online ordering platform where travelers flying out of Seattle can order from over 15 restaurants and counting. You visit the app, pick a good restaurant, pay online and wait. That’s it. Food is delivered either by a human or robot, with accurate order wait times to make sure there aren’t any missed connections!
Seattle partnered with Servy, and their ‘Grab Airport Marketplace’ along with AtYourGate for the technology backend for the new system. You care, because even if you’re in a far away terminal, or comfortably at the gate watching a favorite show, all the best food of the airport can come to you, with easy delivery.
Airports including Los Angeles (LAX), Miami (MIA), Dallas (DFW), New York LaGuardia (LGA) and more than 66 others currently offer some form of the ‘Grab’ airport market in their terminals, either for food ordering, pick up, delivery, or all the above.
Ordering and pick up are cool, but the delivery element is next level. And obviously, so are the robots.
Not only does delivery provide ease of use for travelers trying to find calm, it creates new staffing needs, which brings more jobs to cities using the services. Well, until the robots take over.
What’s exciting, is that although Seattle is among the first to offer delivery of the queue skipping meal ordering system, the technology is already in place in so many airports. If other airports see major success from Seattle’s gate delivery, adding that next layer of the process would be relatively quick. It could be almost “everywhere”.
Most major US airports, as well as a large number in the UK, Scandinavia and Middle East are already using some of the Servy technology, so adding delivery would be a logical next step, as travel demand begins to rebound. If it means camping out with some Netflix at the gate, the airport may soon start to feel like home again.
