What LobbyFlight Does and What Your Plan Includes

What LobbyFlight Does and What Your Plan Includes

This article gives you the overview: what the screen in your lobby actually shows, which parts of the product you will use in the portal, and where your plan draws its limits. Read it once before you configure anything, because almost every setting you will meet later depends on the plan you are on.

The flight board

LobbyFlight runs a departure and arrival board in your lobby, built from live flight data covering over 13,000 airports worldwide. Each flight shows its status, including delays, cancellations and gate changes, so a guest can answer their own question without walking to the front desk.

The board does not paginate. It scrolls continuously through everything it has loaded, which is up to 300 departures and 300 arrivals, and you set the scrolling speed and the pause at the end of a pass per display. That means a busy airport does not force you to choose which flights to show.

How often the data behind the board is refreshed depends on your plan. Basic refreshes once an hour, Pro every 30 minutes and Premium every 5 minutes. This is the single most visible difference between the plans in day-to-day use: on Premium a gate change reaches the lobby within minutes, on Basic it can take up to an hour.

What runs the screen

A display is a browser opening a URL, so it works on anything that runs a modern browser. We recommend a 32-inch commercial screen, and sizes from 24 to 55 inches are supported. The board is designed for continuous 24/7 operation.

You are not limited to a lobby television. Each display runs in one of three modes. TV mode has no touch interaction and scrolls and rotates continuously, which is what you want for a screen nobody touches. Touch mode pauses when a guest interacts and resumes after a timeout, for a kiosk within reach. Website mode is tuned for someone viewing the board in a browser. Displays render in landscape at 1920 × 1080 or in portrait at 1080 × 1920, so a narrow pillar screen is a valid setup.

Making it look like your hotel

You upload a logo in the Logos section of the portal, which is a shared library rather than a single slot. Any image format is accepted, up to 2 MB per file. Each display then picks a logo from the library, so a hotel that runs several screens does not have to upload the same file repeatedly.

Colours work the same way in two layers. Your property has a primary and a secondary brand colour, and an individual display can override them. On Premium a display can override the full colour palette rather than just those two values. You will find all of this in Displays → open a display → Appearance, with a live preview beside the settings under Preview & URL.

For the details, see Branding overview and A tour of the display editor.

Slides between the flights

Alongside flights, a display can show your own slides: shuttle times, breakfast hours, an event notice. You build them once in the Slide Pool under /portal/content and then assign them to whichever displays should run them, which is why the same shuttle slide can appear on three screens and be edited in one place.

Slides are a paid feature. Basic includes none at all, Pro includes five, and Premium is unlimited. If you are on Basic and the slide options look inert, that is the reason. Content and running order explains how slides interleave with the flight board.

Languages

The display ships with 42 languages and can rotate between the ones you select, which is the point for an international guest mix. How many you may select depends on your plan: Basic gives you one language, so no rotation happens, Pro gives you two, and Premium unlocks all 42.

When more than one language is selected, a switch interval appears. It is adjustable from 10 to 600 seconds, so anywhere between ten seconds and ten minutes, and defaults to 60 seconds. A short interval suits a screen people glance at in passing; a longer one suits a seating area where guests read.

Weather

Weather is available from Pro upwards and is not part of Basic. The full weather widget shows current conditions and a three-day forecast. The compact version in the header has less room and shows two days. Both are covered in Languages and weather.

What happens when the connection drops

It is worth knowing exactly what a screen does when the network fails, because the behaviour is less forgiving than people expect. The display holds no persistent cache of flight data. If a data request fails, the flight board replaces its contents with a "Connection error" card offering a retry, and an orange "Offline Mode" badge appears. Old flight times are not left on screen, which is deliberate: a stale departure time is worse than no departure time.

Recovery is automatic. The display keeps polling on its normal refresh interval and picks the data back up as soon as the connection returns, so nobody has to walk over and reload anything. There is also a manual retry button on the error card if you want the data back immediately.

Knowing whether a screen is alive

Every display sends a heartbeat every five minutes, and the portal marks a display offline once twelve minutes have passed without one. The gap is intentional: with a five-minute heartbeat, a five-minute window would flag a healthy screen as down after a single dropped request, while twelve minutes tolerates two missed beats and still surfaces a genuinely dark screen within about a quarter of an hour.

The dashboard distinguishes four states. A display is active when it has reported recently, offline when it has gone quiet past the twelve-minute window, inactive when you switched it off yourself, and never seen when it has been created but never opened on a device. The last one is a setup step you have not finished, not a fault.

More than one screen, more than one house

Each display is its own object with its own URL, colours, languages, layout and slide assignment, so the screen at reception and the screen in the breakfast room can show different things from the same account. How many you may create is a hard plan limit: Basic allows one display, Pro allows three, and Premium is unlimited. Running multiple screens covers the workflow.

If you operate several properties, they live under one organisation with a property switcher in the portal, and access is governed by roles. An Owner administers the organisation, a Manager configures properties and displays, and a Concierge works the guest request queue without touching configuration. See Organisation and properties and Roles and access.

Airports are an organisation-wide pool

Your subscription includes one airport. Every further airport is a paid add-on at €99 per month, and add-ons require Pro or Premium; a Basic subscription cannot add airports at all.

The pool belongs to the organisation rather than to a single house, so an add-on bought once is available to every property and every display you run. Choosing which airport a given display shows happens in the display editor; buying and managing the pool happens under Airports. Selecting airports walks through both.

Concierge and flight tracking

Beyond the lobby board, LobbyFlight has a guest-facing side. A guest opens their own page, you track their specific flight, and pickup and taxi requests arrive in a queue your concierge team works through in the portal.

This is billed by trip. Premium activates a bundle automatically with 50 trips per month included and €0.69 per trip after that. On Basic and Pro you buy a package instead: Concierge S is €39 for 30 trips, Concierge M is €89 for 100 trips, and Concierge L is €199 for 300 trips. Start with Concierge overview if this is the part you were sold on.

Premium-only extras

Two things exist only on Premium and are worth knowing about before you compare plans. White-label removes LobbyFlight branding from the display and lets you serve it from your own domain. Analytics gives you a dashboard over how your displays are actually being used. Both have their own portal pages, and Analytics overview explains what is measured.

Separately, there is an API section where you can issue API keys if you want to drive LobbyFlight from your own systems, which mainly matters to chains with an existing property stack. See API access.

Finding your way around the portal

The portal navigation is the map for everything above. Dashboard is the home screen and shows display status at a glance. Concierge is the guest request queue. Displays is where you create and configure screens. Slide Pool holds your slides. Logos is the logo library. Airports manages the airport pool. Organization covers properties and team. Beyond those, Analytics, Billing, API and Help are reached from the account menu rather than the main rail, because they are not daily work.

A more detailed walkthrough is in Portal overview.

What it costs

Paying yearly costs ten months rather than twelve, so two months are free. Every plan starts with a 7-day free trial, there are no setup fees, you can cancel at any time, and updates are included. Airport add-ons and Concierge packages are billed on top of the plan price. Subscription plans compares the tiers feature by feature.

Getting help

You can reach us by email at info@lobbyflight.com or by phone at +43 650 753 1811, Monday to Friday from 09:00 to 17:00 CET. We answer within one working day.

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