Stanley Robotics at the heart of VINCI Airports’ innovation: Discover the 2018 activity report

On the occasion of the publication of VINCI Airports’ 2018 annual report, we decided to return to the project that began in early 2018 with one of the world’s leading airport operators. Indeed, VINCI Airports is developing, financing, building and managing the daily operations of 46 airports in 12 countries. They have a global strategy to innovate in three areas: intelligent infrastructure, passenger experience and, at the intersection of these two axes, flow management. Their motto: a seamless experience, and it is with this objective in mind that, in early 2018, they chose Stanley Robotics, the first robot valet service in the world.

Based on the number of passengers welcomed each year, Lyon-Saint Exupéry Airport is the leading VINCI Airport in France. With 11 million passengers in 2018, 110,556 journeys and 126 destinations, the latter is growing exponentially. With this increase in passenger traffic, user experience is central to VINCI’s strategy, and establishing a service like that provided by Stanley Robotics makes it possible to eliminate the first point of friction, namely finding a parking space as soon as you arrive at the airport.

This world-first brings time savings and comfort to travellers, all the while allowing 50% more vehicles to be parked in the carpark. All this is made possible thanks to the capabilities provided by an intelligent software package coordinating all our robots. It also makes more sensible use of space by storing more vehicles in a given area. 
Now, after a little more than a year of service at the Lyon-Saint Exupéry Airport, more than 3,000 customers have already had their car parked by Stan and the number of satisfied users is in excess of 95%!

Lastly, our contacts at VINCI Airports have been able to cope with a key component of robust innovation: the fact that everything is not known from the beginning. We must know how to approach each step with confidence and hard work so that innovation can succeed.

Stéphane Evanno, Stanley Robotics, COO & Co-founder

Lyon-Saint Exupéry is also one of VINCI Airports’ innovation program centres of excellence, which exists to share its expertise, skills and services with their entire airport network. With the launch in summer of the Gatwick Airport service and its 46 million passengers in 2018, Stanley Robotics will be able to replicate the successes initiated at Lyon-Saint Exupéry and continue to simplify the user experience at the VINCI group’s airports.