BAA uses text messaging in emergencies

BAA Gatwick, like all major international airports and airlines, has a crisis management team on standby 24 hours a day. Every year, around 30 million passengers travel through Gatwick and the Crisis Team is on hand to ensure that any event with the potential to cause major disruption is kept to a minimum.

Until now the team were contacted via pagers, but as they all now have mobile phones the airport’s Contingency Planning Manager, Barry Owen, began looking for a way to communicate by text message instead. Esendex’s simple, reliable and cost-effective ‘desktop messenger’ service offered the solution.

It enables Gatwick’s Call Centre, which is responsible for contacting the Crisis Team, to send out a short message from a network computer to the mobile phones of various user group members simultaneously and within seconds. Barry Owen says:

"The pager service we were using offered us a text message facility but it didn’t allow recipients to text back - so in an emergency we’d have a group of people all trying to call one telephone number to confirm they’d received the message.

The team’s emergency response is regularly tested through training exercises - getting the communication right at the start is key. During the busy summer months we also made use of the new system to keep the team up-to-date on how the day-to-day airport operation was running and this proved invaluable"