Set Up Your First Display, End to End
A full walkthrough from your first sign-in to a running flight board on a screen in your lobby.
Set Up Your First Display, End to End
This article takes you from your first sign-in to a flight board running on a screen in your lobby. It covers the parts of the portal you will touch on the way — the setup wizard, your airport, your logo library, your colours, your slides — and explains why each one works the way it does, so you can adapt when your situation differs from the happy path.
If you only want the shortest possible route, follow the setup wizard described below and skip the rest until something surprises you.
Before you start
You need a LobbyFlight account with an active subscription, because almost every limit described here comes from your plan: Basic covers one display, Pro covers three, and Premium is unlimited. Plans also decide how often flight data refreshes, whether you get the weather widget, how many languages a board can show and how many information slides you may create. If you are not sure which plan you are on, see Subscription Plans.
On the hardware side you need a screen that can run Chrome — a wall-mounted Android panel is the usual choice — and a stable network connection for it. The board is a web page, so nothing gets installed on the device.
It helps to have your logo file ready before you start, and your brand colours as hex codes in #RRGGBB form. Both can be changed later without touching the screen itself.
Sign in to the portal
Your welcome email arrives with the subject line Welcome to LobbyFlight, <your hotel name> and links to the portal. If you cannot find it, search your inbox and spam folder for "LobbyFlight"; earlier company names will not turn anything up.
Open https://lobbyflight.com/portal. If you are not signed in yet, you are sent to the login form, where you enter your email address and password and select Sign in. The form has an email field, a password field and a Forgot password link — nothing else, so there is no "stay signed in" option to look for. Bookmark the portal address once you are in; you will come back to it whenever a screen needs changing.
What the dashboard is for
The dashboard is a shift board, not a setup checklist. It shows what needs attention right now, the shape of the day ahead, open guest requests, your remaining allowance, the state of your screens and — while your configuration is still incomplete — a setup card.
That setup card is the part that matters today. It lists only the gaps that are still open, such as a missing airport or a missing logo, and each entry links straight to the page that closes it. Once a gap is closed it disappears from the card. If your organisation runs several properties, the property switcher at the top decides which house all of this refers to.
The numbered, step-by-step assistant lives separately at /portal/setup, and that is where a first-time setup is fastest.
Run the setup wizard
The wizard walks through seven steps and creates your first display at the end of it:
Everything the wizard sets can be changed afterwards in the display editor, and much more besides. The sections below explain the individual pieces in the depth the wizard skips.
Your airport
Airports live under Portal → Airports and belong to the whole organisation, not to one screen. Every plan includes exactly one airport, and that included airport is set on this page.
Additional airports are a paid add-on at €99 per month each, and they require Pro or Premium — the Basic plan cannot add any. This is the point most people get wrong: on Pro, "3" is the number of displays, not the number of airports.
To choose one, open the add dialog and use the search field, which matches IATA code, ICAO code, city, airport name and country. The list you see before you type is the set of airports flagged as popular in our database, shown as searchable rows rather than a fixed grid of codes. If your airport is not in the list, type its code into the field below and select Add code.
Adding is not a neutral action. Confirming starts a recurring charge of €99 per month and takes effect immediately — there is no save button on this page. Removing an add-on is equally immediate: the confirmation tells you that displays showing that airport fall back to your included airport and that the charge stops with a pro-rata refund. There is no ordering or display priority here; which airport a given screen shows is chosen per display in the editor.
For more detail, see Airport Selection.
Your logo
Logos live under Portal → Logos as a shared library. You upload a file once, name it, and every display can then pick it — the same file never needs uploading twice, and one logo can be marked as the default for all screens.
The upload area is labelled Click to upload and opens a file picker. It is a click target, not a drop zone, so dragging a file onto it will not work. The interface asks for PNG, JPG or SVG up to 2 MB; the size limit is enforced at 2 MB, and the type check accepts any image file. A preview is generated locally before the file is sent, so what you see immediately is your own file, not yet the stored one.
More on managing the library is in Upload and Manage Logos.
Your colours
Colours work on two levels. Your house colours are the default for every screen: the primary colour starts at #1E40AF and the secondary at #3B82F6, and both are stored as hex values in #RRGGBB form.
Any individual display may override them. You set the override in the display editor, and it is saved together with everything else on that page through the single docked Save button that appears at the bottom as soon as something is unsaved. On Premium you can go further and apply a full colour palette to a display through a design template.
Pick colours with contrast in mind. The board is read from across a lobby, so a pairing that looks refined on a laptop can be unreadable at six metres. Colour Customization goes into this.
Displays are the centre of everything
A display is its own object with its own address, and it is where most configuration actually happens. Open Portal → Displays to see them all and add new ones, within the limits of your plan: one on Basic, three on Pro, unlimited on Premium.
Open a display and you can set:
The data refresh rate is the one thing you cannot set. It follows your plan directly: 60 minutes on Basic, 30 minutes on Pro, 5 minutes on Premium. Keep that in mind later when you test.
Display Editor Tour walks through the editor tab by tab, and Multiple Screens covers running more than one.
Information slides
Slides are what the board says between the flights. They live under Portal → Slide Pool, which opens the Slides page, and they are built once there and then assigned to individual displays.
Slides are a paid feature: Basic includes none and the interface is locked, Pro covers five, and Premium is unlimited. Available types are Info, Shuttle, Restaurant, Spa, Events and Amenities.
Select Add slide to create one. Choose the type, write a title and the body text — line breaks are respected and are the way to shape it — and optionally upload an image. The dialog closes with Add Slide, or with Save Changes when you are editing an existing slide. On Pro and Premium there is also a design editor for layout, background, text style, image position and translations.
Content Running Order explains how slides and flights share the screen.
Get the address onto the screen
Every display has its own address in the form /display/{hotelId}?display={displayId}. The display parameter is what makes it that screen rather than another; without it, only your default display is served. On Premium the board can be served under your own domain instead of lobbyflight.com.
You will find the address in two places: in the display list, and in the editor under Displays → open the display → Preview & URL. The setup wizard shows it at step 6.
There are two ways to get it onto the device. Copy URL puts it on your clipboard for pasting or sending. The QR code next to it is usually quicker on an Android panel: open the camera, scan, and the board opens in the browser. The QR code can also be downloaded if you would rather print it and hand it to whoever mounts the screen.
On the device, open Chrome, go to the address, then tap the menu (⋮) and choose Add to Home screen. Name it "LobbyFlight" so whoever finds the panel later knows what the icon is. To stop guests and staff leaving the board by accident, put the device into kiosk mode — see Kiosk Mode Activation and Android Display Setup.
Details on addresses and QR codes are in Display URL and QR Code.
Check that it is right
Look at the header first. Your hotel name and logo sit on the left, the time and date on the right, and the weather widget appears there too if you enabled it and your plan includes it. If the logo is missing here, the display is not pointing at the logo you think it is.
Then look at the board. It does not page through flights in fixed blocks; it scrolls continuously through everything it has loaded, which can be up to 300 departures and 300 arrivals. A row shows the time, the flight number, the airline, the destination or origin, the status, and the terminal and gate — which of these are visible depends on the display mode and the column configuration you chose.
If rotation is on, the board switches between departures and arrivals at the interval you set; 30 seconds is the default, not a fixed rule. Slides, if you assigned any, appear in the rotation as well.
When you test the refresh, use the interval your plan actually gives you. Waiting five minutes for new data only works on Premium; on Pro it can take up to 30 minutes and on Basic up to an hour, so the same test would look like a failure there.
When a screen goes quiet
Each display sends a heartbeat every five minutes, and it is counted as offline once nothing has arrived for twelve minutes. That gap is deliberate: a single missed heartbeat is normal, so a shorter threshold would raise false alarms. The portal distinguishes four states — active, offline, inactive, and never opened. "Inactive" means you switched the display off yourself, and "never opened" means it was created but its address has never been loaded on any device, which is a setup step rather than a fault.
If the board itself loses its data connection, it replaces the flight list with a connection-error card and a retry button, and shows an offline badge. Recovery happens on its own with the next successful refresh, at the interval your plan defines, or immediately if you use the retry button. Offline Mode and Caching covers this in more depth.
If you get stuck
The support team answers within 24 hours. You can reach them by email at info@lobbyflight.com, by phone at +43 650 753 1811, or from inside the portal under Portal → Help, which is the fastest route because it sends along the context of your account.