Set Up Your First Display

This article takes you from a fresh portal account to a screen in your lobby showing live flight information. The path runs through the setup wizard at /portal/setup, which asks seven questions and creates your first display at the end. Everything after that is refinement rather than setup.

What you need before you start

You need your portal credentials, meaning the email address and password you registered with.

If you have a logo ready, it should be a PNG, JPG or SVG file no larger than 2 MB. The upload field states the same limits: "PNG, JPG, or SVG. Max 2MB." A transparent PNG or SVG gives the best result, and the recommended size is 400 by 200 pixels. The logo step is optional and can be skipped, so a missing file is no reason to postpone the setup.

You also need the IATA code of the airport your guests fly from, such as VIE, JFK or LHR. If you do not know it, you can search for the airport by name inside the wizard.

For the screen itself, any device with a current browser will do. The display is an ordinary web page and not an app, so a TV with a browser, a tablet, a mini PC or a laptop all work. What matters is a stable network connection, because the page fetches flight data over the internet.

One point about permissions before you begin: the Displays, Logos and Airports pages are visible to organization owners and property managers. A user with the concierge role sees the dashboard, the concierge pages and help, and cannot run this setup. If you are unsure which role you hold, see Roles and access.

Sign in to the portal

Open /login. The page is headed "Hotel Portal Login". Enter your email address and password, then select Sign in. If you open /portal directly without being signed in, you are sent to the same login page, so either address gets you there.

If the password does not work, use the Forgot your password? link below the form rather than guessing. It sends a reset link to the address on your account.

Walk through the setup wizard

Open /portal/setup. The wizard has seven steps, and a progress bar at the top shows where you are. You can go back to any earlier step until the display is created.

Display Name. Name the screen after the place it stands, for example "Lobby, main entrance". The name is for your own orientation in the portal and is not shown on the screen itself.

Airport. Choose the one airport this display should show. You can pick from the list of available airports or search for one. Every plan includes exactly one airport; additional ones are a paid add-on, described further down.

Flight Type. Decide whether the screen shows departures, arrivals, or both. The wizard suggests departures, on the reasoning that most guests are on their way to the airport rather than arriving from it. This choice matters more than it looks: with departures or arrivals alone, the board stays on one view, while "both" is what makes it alternate.

Logo. Upload your logo, or use Skip and add one later from the logo library.

Colors. Set the primary color, used for headers and buttons, and the secondary color, used for accents and highlights. Each one takes either a color picker or a hex value such as #0A2463, and the preview beside the fields updates as you change them.

Preview. This step summarises the display name, airport, flight type, logo and colors. Confirming it is what actually creates the display, so read the summary before continuing.

Complete. The display now exists. This step shows its URL, a Copy URL button, an Open link and a QR code you can scan with the camera of the screen device.

Once the setup is marked complete, opening /portal/setup again sends you to the dashboard. From then on you create further screens under Displays, and you change existing ones in the display editor.

Open the display URL on the screen

Copy the URL from step 7 and open it in the browser on your screen device, or scan the QR code with that device's camera. The QR code encodes the same URL, so scanning simply saves you from typing it.

The URL has the form /display/<hotel-id>?display=<display-id>. The ?display= part is the important half. Without it, the page still renders using your property's defaults, but it carries none of that display's own settings, and it sends no heartbeat, so the portal cannot tell you whether the screen is running. Use the full URL with the query parameter.

Each screen is its own object in the portal with its own URL, its own device mode, its own logo and its own settings. Do not open the same URL on two screens. The portal will read the two devices as one device reporting twice, and heartbeat and analytics figures will be wrong. Create a second display instead, as described below.

Choose the device mode

Each display has a Device setting, found in the display editor under Displays → open the screen → General. It decides which features the screen has.

TV is for a wall-mounted board with no touch input. It scrolls and rotates continuously, ignores touch events, and has no search.

Touch is for a touchscreen guests can use. Interaction pauses the rotation for 30 seconds so a guest can read what they stopped on, and search can be switched on. This mode requires the Pro plan.

Website is for embedding the board on your own site. It shows a static board rather than a rotating one, with autoscroll and rotation both off. This mode requires the Premium plan.

What the finished screen shows

The header carries your hotel name, your logo if you uploaded one, and the current time and date. Below it sits the flight board, styled in your primary and secondary colors.

How the board changes over time depends on two settings. When rotation is on, the board runs a departures phase and then an arrivals phase, and each phase lasts as long as Show flights for in the Behavior tab of the display editor, which defaults to 120 seconds and accepts values between 5 and 300 seconds. If you have info slides assigned to the screen, they join the same cycle after the flight phases, each for its own configured duration. On a Touch or Website display, touching the screen pauses that rotation for 30 seconds; a TV display never pauses.

How often the underlying flight data is refreshed depends on your plan. Basic refreshes every 60 minutes, Pro every 30 minutes, and Premium every 5 minutes.

If the connection drops, the display keeps showing the flight data it already has and marks itself as offline, checking every 30 seconds whether it can reach the service again, and returning to normal by itself once it can. One limitation is worth knowing: the display page is not cached for offline use, so reloading the page while the connection is down leaves you with nothing to show. When a screen is offline, leave it alone rather than reloading it.

Add more screens

Additional displays are created under Displays → Add display, which is the page at /portal/displays/new. It asks for much the same information as the wizard: name, airport, what the board shows, device mode, columns and look.

How many screens you may run depends on your plan: one on Basic, three on Pro, and no fixed limit on Premium. When you are at your limit, the button leads to billing instead of to the creation form.

Add airports beyond the first

Airports live under Airports, a page headed "Airport Management" with two parts. Included Airport is the one your subscription covers at no extra cost. Additional Airports is a paid add-on at 99 euros per month per airport, added with the Add Airport button and available on the Pro and Premium plans only.

Two details are easy to miss. Added airports are billed as items on your subscription, so adding one changes your monthly invoice. And they belong to the organization rather than to a single property, which means every property in your organization draws from the same pool of airports.

Beyond the popular airports offered in the list, you can enter any IATA code of three or four characters directly.

Manage your logos

Logos are kept in a library under Logos, not tied to one screen. You can upload several, give each a name, mark one as the default, and then choose per display which one it carries. The library previews each logo both on a dark background, as it appears on the board, and on a light one, as it appears on the guest page, which is how you catch a logo that only works against one of the two.

Deleting a logo removes it from every display currently using it, and those displays fall back to the hotel logo. The confirmation dialog tells you how many screens are affected before you delete.

Check whether a screen is actually running

A running display reports in every 5 minutes. The portal waits 12 minutes without a signal before calling it offline, because a single missed report during a reload or a brief network blip says nothing about the screen's health. So a screen that has just been switched on may need a few minutes before it shows as running, and a screen that stops being reachable is reported within about a quarter of an hour.

The status you see is one of three. Active means it reported recently. Offline means it should be running but has not reported, which also covers a display that has been created but never opened. Inactive means you switched it off yourself, which is not a fault. An inactive display makes no API calls, and that is also why the Preview & URL tab in the editor is only available once the display is active.

When something is not right

The portal has its own help page at Help, reachable from the sidebar and from the menu under your avatar. It shows the same help library as this site, but starting from your own account, listing your plan, how many of your screens and slides are in use, your airports and whether concierge is on. That context answers many questions before you search for anything.

If you need a person, write to info@lobbyflight.com or call +43 650 753 1811.

Next steps

Display URL and QR code explains the URL and the QR code in more detail, including how to get them for an existing screen.

Display editor tour walks through the tabs you will use to change a screen after it exists.

Running order of content covers info slides and how they fit into the rotation.

No flights showing is the place to start if the board comes up empty.

Set Up Your First Display