  With the advent of Industry 4.0 technologies in the last decade, airports
have undergone digitalisation to capitalise on the purported benefits of these
technologies such as improved operational efficiency and passenger experience.
The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic with emergence of its variants (e.g. Delta,
Omicron) has exacerbated the need for airports to adopt new technologies such
as contactless and robotic technologies to facilitate travel during this
pandemic. However, there is limited knowledge of recent challenges and success
factors for adoption of digital technologies in airports. Therefore, through an
industry survey of airport operators and managers around the world (n=102,
0.754<Composite Reliability<0.892; conducted during COVID-19), this study
identifies the challenges faced in adopting Industry 4.0 technologies (n=20) as
well as enhances understanding of best practices or success factors that
supported technology adoption in airports. The widely used technology,
organisation, environment (TOE) framework is used as a theoretically basis for
the quantitative part of the questionnaire. A complementary qualitative part is
used to underpin and extend the findings. The industry survey is the
first-of-its-kind that was conducted to understand the implementation
challenges that airport operators face in adopting Industry 4.0 technologies in
the airport. The survey results have shown that that the Industry 4.0
technologies were not implemented to a similar extent in airports despite the
generic challenges that were faced in adopting the various Industry 4.0
technologies in the airport.
