HOW IT WORKS
DwellTime reads airport disruption and turns it into passenger dwell-time pressure, demand pressure, and airport disruption risk, with a time window on every signal.
When an airport is disrupted, passengers spend longer inside the terminal. DwellTime spots that change early and tells the businesses around them what it means, with a time window on every signal.
Weather, delays, cancellations, irregular operations or congestion start to slow the airport down.
Instead of boarding or leaving, people wait in seating areas, queues, cafes and shops.
Three scores, a time window and suggested actions for your type of business, before the rush peaks.
Illustrative shape, not real data.
Is there a raised risk that passengers stay in this terminal longer than they usually would at this hour?
The upstream behavioral score. When departures slip, when gates fill, when boarding is held, passengers spend more time in seating areas, queues, concourses and retail zones. That extra time is what changes demand around them.
Not a measurement. It does not count people, track individual passengers, or report actual footfall inside your unit.
Is demand for your kind of business likely to rise or fall inside the window?
The only score scoped to a business type. A grab-and-go cafe in a departures concourse and a taxi operator working the arrivals curb sit at the same airport and can receive opposite signals from the same disruption.
Not a revenue forecast. It will never tell you how many coffees you will sell. It tells you which way pressure leans and how strongly.
How likely is it that airport operations and passenger flow are being affected, or are about to be?
The context score. It explains why the other two are moving: weather, delays, cancellations, congestion or irregular operations.
Not a flight status board. It describes pressure on the system, not the fate of one aircraft, and it does not replace an airline or handler feed.
The responses below are illustrative examples of how operators tend to react. They are not instructions. DwellTime does not know your rota, your stockroom, your contracts or your service standards.
The tightest horizon, for changes that land inside the service you are working right now. Enough time to move a break, open a second till, or pull stock from the back.
Suits: Counter service, queues, curbside dispatch
The window that matters most to a shift manager. Roughly the gap between seeing pressure build and being able to do something about it: call someone in early, shift drivers to a later pickup, prepare hot drinks capacity.
Suits: Staffing, stock, driver positioning
For operations that need more notice than a service window. A forecast reaching days ahead is interesting for planning but arrives too early to change today. Six hours is still today.
Suits: Hotels holding rooms, late rosters, shuttle planning
A level on its own is only half the message. Three things travel with every score and decide how much weight it deserves.
Every signal carries a confidence score between 0 and 1. Confidence describes how much supporting evidence sits behind the level, not how severe the level is. The two are independent, and keeping them separate is what makes the signal honest.
Read a low-confidence HIGH the way you would read a colleague saying they think it is about to get busy but they are not certain. It is a reason to look, not a reason to commit. Prefer a reversible move such as delaying a break over an expensive one such as calling in extra staff. A high-confidence HIGH backed by reasons you recognize is what earns a real change to the shift.
Every signal also carries reason classes: short machine-readable labels, one for weather disruption risk and another for rising delay pressure, that name what pushed the level where it landed.
They are stable identifiers rather than sentences, so a dashboard can label them, an alert can filter on them, and your own systems can route on them without parsing free text. Check whether they match what your team can actually see in the terminal.
Alongside the scores, a signal carries suggested actions scoped to your business type. A cafe may be prompted to add grab-and-go stock. A ground transport operator may be prompted to stage drivers for a later curbside peak instead, because curbside demand and counter demand behave differently.
They never trigger anything on their own. DwellTime will not place an order, change a rota, or dispatch a vehicle. The person who knows the site decides.
The things operators ask first when they see the three levels for the time.
No. That is the point of the product. The scores are written in business terms, and the reason classes name drivers such as weather disruption or rising delay pressure without asking you to read a raw aviation report.
Because they answer different questions, and collapsing them would hide the disagreement that matters. Dwell-time pressure can be high while demand pressure for your business type is flat. One number would average that away and give you a worse decision.
Dwell-time pressure is about passenger behavior: are people likely to stay longer than usual. Demand pressure is about your business: is demand for your kind of operation likely to move. The first drives the second, but not evenly, and not in the same direction for every business type.
Yes, and the confidence value exists so you can tell how likely that is. A HIGH at low confidence means the evidence is thin. Treat it as a reason to look rather than a reason to spend money.
No. It means a large change is likely inside the window and the effect may run past it. It is an operational and commercial signal about passenger flow and demand, not a safety alert, and it carries no authority over anything happening airside.
No. The scores describe pressure on an airport or terminal, not the fate of a single service. If you need per-flight status, that is a different category of product and an airline or handler feed is the right source.
Coverage has not been announced. Pilot locations will depend on data availability and on the businesses taking part. Tell us your airport on the pilot page and it will inform where we start.
DwellTime is in early development. Tell us about your airport and your business, and help shape the first pilot.
