Choosing the Airports Your Displays Show

Choosing the Airports Your Displays Show

Airports in LobbyFlight work on two levels, and most confusion comes from mixing them up. First, your organisation owns a pool of airports: one is included in your plan, and any further one is a paid add-on. Second, each individual display shows exactly one airport from that pool. This article covers both: how to manage the pool under Airports, and how to point a screen at a particular airport in the display editor, including which clock it then follows.

What your plan includes

Every plan, Basic at €69 per month, Pro at €149 and Premium at €199, includes exactly one airport. There is no tiered airport allowance: the plans differ in how many displays you may run and whether you may buy airports at all, not in how many airports they contain.

Each additional airport is an add-on that costs €99 per month. Pro and Premium can buy as many as they need. Basic cannot buy any, so a Basic subscription is limited to its one included airport. On Basic you will see an amber notice on the Airports page reading "Basic plan includes 1 airport. Upgrade to Pro or Premium to add additional airports for 99 €/month each.", and the Add airport button is greyed out with the tooltip "Upgrade to add more airports".

The limit you are more likely to reach is the display limit, because one display shows one airport. If you want departures from two airports side by side in your lobby, you need two displays: Basic allows one display, Pro allows three and Premium is unlimited. That coupling, more airports on screen meaning more screens, is usually the real reason to upgrade.

The airport pool belongs to the organisation

The pool is owned by your organisation, not by an individual property. An add-on you buy once is available to every property and every display in the organisation. The included airport is attached to your organisation's home property, which is the one that holds the subscription, or otherwise the oldest one.

The pool also feeds the Concierge module's airport settings, so adding or removing an airport reaches further than the flight board. Access is limited by role: only organisation owners and managers see Airports in the navigation; Concierge users do not.

Managing the pool under Airports

Open Airports in the left-hand navigation. You get one list with a row per airport: the IATA code, the airport name, and a price column that tells the two kinds apart. The included airport reads "in your plan", and every add-on reads "99 €/mo". The included airport is listed first, and the add-ons follow in the order you bought them. This order has no effect; there is no primary airport and nothing to reorder.

There is no save button on this page. Every action takes effect immediately, and because adding and removing airports are billing events, both ask for confirmation first.

Changing the included airport

Use the pencil icon (Change airport) on the included row. The dialog is headed "Change the included airport" and notes that "Displays on the old airport move to the new one." In practice, each display stores its own airport, and a display that was set up in the editor keeps the code it has. After changing the included airport, open each display and select the new airport under General → Airport and time; until you do, that screen continues to show the old airport's flights.

The included row also has a Remove airport action, which asks "Remove your included airport? Every display falls back to no flights until you choose a new one." Screens do not go blank, though: a display keeps the airport stored on it, even though that airport is no longer in your pool. Set a new included airport straight away and check your displays afterwards.

Adding a paid airport

Click Add airport. The dialog states the consequence before you pick anything: "Adding an airport starts a recurring charge of 99 € per month."

The list you see comes from our airport reference table, with up to 50 airports marked as popular. Type in the search field to look beyond them; the search runs roughly a third of a second after you stop typing. Airports already in your pool are hidden, so you cannot add the same one twice.

If the airport you need is not in the reference table, use the small code field at the bottom of the dialog, type the three- or four-character code and click Add code. Pressing Enter does nothing here, and the field only exists when you add an airport, not when you change the included one.

Confirming creates the subscription item straight away. An add-on can briefly appear in the list marked "being set up" while that completes. If you previously removed this exact airport, the old record is reactivated rather than a new one created.

Removing a paid airport

Use the trash icon on an add-on row. The confirmation spells out both consequences: "Remove {code}? Displays showing it switch to your included airport, and the 99 €/month charge stops with a pro-rata refund." Any display in the organisation that was set to that airport is moved to your included airport.

Because removing and re-adding are real billing operations, treat them as such. There is never a reason to clear the pool just to change what a screen shows.

Pointing a display at an airport

Which airport a screen shows is set in the display editor, not on the Airports page. Go to Displays, open the display and stay on the General tab. In the section Airport and time, the Airport field shows one button per airport in your pool; click one to select it. The choice is single: each display has exactly one airport. The Manage Airports link in the section header takes you to the pool if the airport you want is not there yet. As everywhere in the editor, the change reaches the screen after you press Save.

The same airport decides more than the flight list. The weather in the header is fetched for it, and the leave-hotel-by column uses the transfer time you entered for that airport in the Concierge settings; see Set up the leave-hotel-by column.

Airport time or hotel time

Directly below the airport, Times shown in decides which clock the board follows. With the airport's time, the default, the header clock and every flight time run in the airport's time zone. With the hotel's time, they follow the clock of the device the board runs on, as they always have. If that device's clock cannot be trusted, set Local time from (shown right below once the hotel's time is selected) to the hotel's time zone (from its address): the board then uses the time zone LobbyFlight derives from the hotel address, and the device clock only when none is known.

The choice only matters when the airport lies in a different time zone from the hotel, for example a resort served by an airport across a border. It also sets the clock for night mode in Design → Screen, so the night window starts at the time you expect. If times look shifted by an hour or more, read Flight Times or the Clock Show the Wrong Time Zone.

Time Format, in the same section, switches between the 24-hour and the 12-hour clock.

Alternating, and what it does not do

Whether a board alternates between departures and arrivals, and how long each phase lasts, is no longer set next to the airport. Both live in the Design tab: Shows under Flight list, and the alternating switch together with Show flights for under Motion. Show flights for accepts 10 to 600 seconds and is 120 seconds by default. Alternating never switches between airports; that feature does not exist, because a display only ever has one airport.

About IATA codes and flight data

A code is accepted if it is three or four characters long; lower case is converted to upper case, and no check is made for letters versus digits. Whether the code actually exists is not verified either.

That matters more than it sounds. If the flight data provider returns nothing for a code, the display does not simply say that there are no flights. It first falls back to a spare copy of the last successful result, kept for 24 hours, and after that to demo flights. A guest looking at your board could therefore be reading invented departures. If a screen shows flights that look plausible but never match reality, a mistyped airport code is the first thing to check.

Flight data comes from the AviationStack API. Results are cached for as long as your plan's refresh interval: 60 minutes on Basic, 30 minutes on Pro and 5 minutes on Premium. Hotels watching the same airport share the same cached data, which keeps responses fast.

What the board then does with the data is up to you. By default it shows every flight it receives and scrolls through them; from Pro it can turn pages instead and limit how far ahead it looks. On Premium, Design → Filters lets a screen show only certain airlines or leave some out, with codeshare flights counted by any of their carriers, highlight partner airlines and limit the list to particular terminals. The filters work on the board itself, so every display at the same airport still shares one data source.

Upgrading to buy airports

If you are on Basic and need a second airport, go to Billing in the portal and use the upgrade cards with the Upgrade now button. The Manage Subscription button on the same page opens the customer portal for payment methods and invoices; you cannot choose a LobbyFlight plan there. Upgrades are billed pro rata and take effect immediately, so you can return to Airports and add your airport right away.

Troubleshooting

A screen still shows the old airport after I changed the included one. Displays keep the airport stored on them. Open the display, select the new airport under General → Airport and time and save.

The flights look plausible but never match the departure hall. Check the airport code for a typing error. An unknown code leads to demo flights rather than an empty board.

The clock is an hour off. Check Times shown in under General → Airport and time. If the hotel's time is selected, the board uses the device's own clock unless Local time from is set to the hotel's time zone; check the device's clock and time zone, or switch that setting over.

The airport I need is missing from the list. Type its code into the field at the bottom of the add dialog and click Add code.

Next steps

Support

If something here does not match what you see, write to info@lobbyflight.com. Support is available Monday to Friday, 09:00 to 17:00 CET.