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, any further one is a paid add-on. Second, each individual display shows exactly one airport out of 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.

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 effectively 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". On Pro and Premium there is no airport limit to run into.

The limit you will run into instead 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, Premium is unlimited. That coupling — more airports on screen means 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 — the one that holds the Stripe subscription, or otherwise the oldest one.

The pool also feeds the Concierge module's pickup configuration, 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", every add-on reads "99 €/mo". The included airport is listed first, the add-ons follow in the order you bought them. This order has no effect on anything; there is no primary airport and nothing to reorder.

There is no save button on this page. Every action writes 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 warns you that "Displays on the old airport move to the new one." That is not a figure of speech: when you confirm, every display on the home property that was showing the old code is switched to the new one automatically.

The included airport cannot be swapped for nothing by accident. Its Remove airport action asks "Remove your included airport? Every display falls back to no flights until you choose a new one." — which is exactly what happens. Without an airport, a display has no flights to show.

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 is loaded from our airport reference table — up to 50 airports marked as popular, sorted by popularity and then by city. Type in the search field to look beyond them; the search runs against the reference table 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 code and click Add code. Pressing Enter does nothing here. Note that this field only exists in the add-on dialog, not when you are changing the included airport.

Confirming creates the subscription item in Stripe 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 pointed at that airport falls back 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 given screen shows is set in the display editor, not on the Airports page. Go to Displays → open the display → Airport and time. Under Airport you will find one button per airport in your pool; click one to select it. The selection is single-choice — each display has exactly one airport. The Manage Airports link in that section takes you back to the pool if the airport you want is not there yet.

Two related settings live nearby. Show flights for controls how long the flight board stays on screen between your own info slides and direction changes; it is measured in seconds, defaults to 30 and accepts values between 5 and 300. Auto-rotate flights (Departures ↔ Arrivals), under What the board shows, alternates the board between the two directions. It does not rotate between airports — no such feature exists, because a display only ever has one airport. With rotation off and a single-column layout, the board shows one direction only.

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 "No flights". It first falls back to a cached 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, 5 minutes on Premium. Hotels watching the same airport share the same cached data, which keeps responses fast. The board renders every flight it receives and scrolls through them automatically, so there is no fixed number of rows. Filtering by airline is not possible at present.

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 Stripe 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.

Next steps

Support

For questions about airport selection, write to info@lobbyflight.com or call +43 650 753 1811.