Supporting sustainable commuting at London Stansted Airport

Keeping a growing airport workforce moving

London Stansted Airport is one of the UK’s fastest growing airports, powered by a workforce of over 13,000 people. This workforce generates a significant volume of regular, daily trips to and from the site, presenting a clear opportunity to influence travel behaviour and reduce solo vehicle use. Beyond transport, commuting patterns have wider implications, affecting operational resilience, recruitment and retention, and the overall passenger experience across the airport.

While a wide range of sustainable travel options are already available, the scale of the site, dispersed employee catchment and prevalence of round-the-clock, shift-based working create ever-changing challenges in enabling consistent and accessible travel choices for all.

Alongside this, future passenger growth is tied to planning requirements to reduce solo vehicle trips. This creates a clear need to go beyond traditional data collection, developing a deeper understanding of motivations and barriers to transport and identifying where meaningful, targeted change can be delivered.

Looking beyond how people travel to understand why

To respond to this challenge, we applied tools from our TripSwitch behaviour change toolkit to identify the key factors shaping commuting decisions. By combining insight from over 2,500 staff across more than 70 organisations, we developed a detailed evidence base of workforce travel patterns, attitudes, and potential for change.

Using our Audience Assessment tool, we segmented the workforce based on their openness to changing how they travel. This highlighted the groups most likely to shift behaviour and the conditions needed to support them, providing a clear basis for prioritising interventions.

This approach translated complex datasets into clear, actionable insight, enabling a focused and deliverable strategy for influencing travel choices.

Targeting change to support sustainable growth

The result is a step change in how workforce travel at London Stansted Airport can be understood and influenced. It demonstrates that a substantial proportion of employees are open to using more sustainable modes, given the right conditions.

These insights are now being used to shape London Stansted’s surface access strategy, guide engagement with employers and employees, and inform the development of targeted, deliverable measures.

Guided by this same collaborative approach, we have also implemented this work at Manchester Airport and East Midlands Airport, providing Manchester Airports Group with a consistent, scalable and repeatable way to understand workforce travel. This shared evidence base enables insight to be compared, learned from and applied across all three airports, supporting a more aligned and informed approach to decision-making.

We are proud to support Manchester Airports Group in achieving their long-term growth ambitions through a combination of behavioural insight and data-led analysis, enabling more sustainable commuting at scale.