Airport proprioception:
What APNE revealed about how airports really move
Proprioception is your body’s sense of where you are in space. It’s how you move without constantly looking at your feet. Do airports have it?
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What is proprioception?
Here’s something I didn’t expect to hear at an airport parking conference: proprioception. The keynote speaker at APNE 2025 dropped it into their opening talk and the whole room leaned in.
Proprioception is your body’s sense of where you are in space. It’s how you move without constantly looking at your feet.
And the second it was explained, it hit me.
Most airports don’t have this.
They know what assets they have, but not exactly where everything is or how it’s moving. With hundreds of cars, keys, shuttles, staff and systems all shifting around every hour, that lack of awareness isn’t a small problem. It slows things down. It creates friction. It costs money.
APNE made that clear. Speaker after speaker described the same issue in different ways. Airports struggle because they don’t have space. But in reality they struggle because they don’t have visibility.
The visibility gap
When airports lose track of what’s moving where, operations slow down and customer experience suffers. This comes up again and again in our conversations with airports.
Airports have a visibility problem.
When the car park, ops team and booking system all operate in isolation, every delay gets amplified. Staff become firefighters instead of operators. And customers feel it before anyone else.
That is where proprioception matters. Awareness. Alignment. The ability to not only react in the moment but also before the problem even arises.
Airports need that same awareness inside their parking and ground transport operations.
Airports need operational oversight
Our block parking workshop brought this to life.
Participants had to move cars (magnet versions, thankfully), park them by the return date and simulate the daily flow. Within minutes, the disputes rolled in as there were conflicting opinions on where to place cars. Because our players couldn’t see the whole picture, they didn’t know what cars were coming in next until they had already arrived. They could only make decisions based on what was in front of them. And that was just 18 cars and three lanes!
Give an airport real-time visibility of who’s coming into the car park with pre-book, then give them the tools they need to manage them and things begin to click into place. Then turn the dial by overlaying AI and machine learning so every movement becomes intentional, not reactive.
Because the system plans it better than we can. Airports start to understand themselves and operations become proactive rather than reactive.
Europe feels ready. The US is still getting started.
Across Europe, airports are already experimenting with valet-style operations and hardware similar to Schiphol Airport’s (which we got to tour!). There’s momentum. People want to optimise space, not expand it.
The US looks very different. Most airports still don’t even offer pre-booking and valet is a customer-driven product rather than an operational enabler. The Sacramento team shared an interesting example. They recently had to close around 800 parking spaces to build a new multi-storey facility.
While the US might not have the same need for block parking the way Europe and the UK do, a temporary valet setup could have protected more capacity during the build. It wouldn’t solve everything, but it would have softened the impact.
This contrast came up a lot at APNE…
Europe is refining.
The US is at the starting line.
Why proprioception might be the mindset airports need next
To move well, you need to know where you are. Airports are no different. Better visibility leads to better decisions. And better decisions lead to faster, smoother, more efficient movement.
Imagine an airport where:
- Every car is tracked
- Every key is always accounted for
- Movements are predicted rather than reacted to
- Car parks are fully utilised
- Operations are consistent, scalable and driven by data
That is operational proprioception. And judging by APNE, airports want it. They’re ready for it.
“We need strategic thinking, critical thinking. We need to make a move strategically without reacting. As leaders, we need proprioception.”
–Andrew Bryant, APNE Keynote Speaker
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