A recent article extolled the virtues of the so-called Skytopia project as the brand name for what is hoped to be an iconic HK$100 billion ($12.8 billion) development integrated into our excellent international airport. It will inevitably become a destination in itself, and on the face of it, the plans and vision are exciting, impactful and ambitious. It is as impressive as it is costly, proposing a range of enticing offerings covering entertainment, leisure, food and beverages (F&B), and shopping. A key intent is for it to act as a magnet to attract customers and businesses from across the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area and its 86 million inhabitants and, of course, to seek attention from the 120 million travelers expected to pass through our airport annually by the middle of the next decade. So, millions of potential customers for Skytopia — a lofty number, but are there headwinds?

At the base level, it is about service, quality, convenience, and value. The entire enterprise could suffer if any of these key drivers of commercial success are lacking or below par.

I have seen this in Cyberport every day for the last 10 years, which touted similar lofty ambitions, albeit on a less grand scale. Cyberport’s shopping and service enterprises, notwithstanding some F&B standouts, have suffered continuously and have not recovered post-COVID-19. Even the longstanding home furnishings outlet has just closed — a vendor I have personally shopped at since 2015 — while coffee shops, doctor’s surgeries, and multiple other enterprises come and go on surprisingly short timescales, and many other shopfronts have remained closed for years. Little seems to work well according to the accumulated evidence of my own eyes. This is despite the higher-end consumers living in luxury apartment blocks in and around Cyberport. So, the response to this serious issue is to build Cyberport 5… perhaps in the hope of “build it, and they will come”.

What is lacking is an MTR station to connect Cyberport to the integrated, efficient, and high-cadence citywide transport system. Cyberport MTR plans have been much debated but not fulfilled for various technical, geological, and cost reasons. Still, it is a fundamental drag on potential and a key factor in the current malaise. Also, there is potential, especially with the impressive Cyberport 5 now taking shape, to add a pier and ferry service as an alternative transport option to Central, Lamma Island, and elsewhere. It would be another drawcard. Cyberport as a destination like a smaller scale Skytopia — Cybertopia anyone?

Of course, this is not an issue for Skytopia, which will be closely integrated into the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region’s transport ecosystem to Macao and Zhuhai via the Hong Kong-Zhuhai-Macao Bridge and to Shenzhen via the excellent highway — I am thinking more of downstream feeder issues and the concept of highly integrated world service levels every step of the way.

Hong Kong used to pride itself on service quality, but I fear we are losing this edge across multiple domains on the all-too-powerful altar of saving money and reducing head count, without proper regard for the hidden costs and counterproductive elements that may later emerge when it is often too late. I highlighted this in a recent article on the increasing prevalence of app-based customer service replacing human-to-human service.

For Skytopia, these big vision plans need to include a holistic and, I would say, marginal gains mindset so that along the entire service channels from city to airport and from HKSAR to the Greater Bay Area and the world, the journey becomes as important as the destination, ... The full experience can create satisfied and happy customers who leave with positive impressions for sharing, returning, and spending

We are still a social species, and, at least for older generations like mine, human interactions and connections still matter — we are not yet AI-controlled, driven, manipulated, and influenced, though I fear it is coming.

So I hark back to a China Daily article from last year that lamented the effective loss of the in-town check-in service. It used to be a fantastic facility and the envy of the traveling world. I have lost count of the times I heard international visitors pre-COVID-19 gush approvingly of this tremendous innovation. Post-COVID-19, there were high expectations that it would return, but it has not. The excellent infrastructure now lies largely idle. Cathay Pacific and Hong Kong Airlines do offer a limited service, but it plays to the minimum service levels of my earlier article by replacing humans with kiosks. Here, customers need to make nearly all the effort themselves, including scanning their passport, interacting repeatedly with a screen to answer multiple questions, printing out their boarding card and baggage slips, attaching them (hopefully securely) to their luggage, and finally taking them to a single counter for eventual airport delivery. Of course, this is now common in airports across the world, but is this really a good thing?

If we in the HKSAR are different and offer something that sets us apart as a more caring, human, personal, and still effective service, is this not, in reality, a competitive edge? What we now have is an inferior imitation of a once superior service. Even the Cathay office next door, where it was possible to get personal service from an actual human being to check flights, upgrade seats, change bookings, and so forth, remains shuttered and silent.

So for Skytopia, these big vision plans need to include a holistic and, I would say, marginal gains mindset so that along the entire service channels from city to airport and from HKSAR to the Greater Bay Area and the world, the journey becomes as important as the destination, with proper and universal in-town check-in being but one example. So, service levels across the entire journey matter. The full experience can create satisfied and happy customers who leave with positive impressions for sharing, returning, and spending.

The author is a professor in the Faculty of Science and director of the Laboratory for Space Research at the University of Hong Kong.

The views do not necessarily reflect those of China Daily.