Airport experiences tend to swing one of two ways: arriving too early and ending up waiting for your gate to open for much longer than necessary, or anxiously standing in a queue you can’t seem to see the end of, wondering if you’ll have to run to make it onto the plane.
Amit Meldassi set out to find a way for passengers to experience the satisfying in-between. No more rolling a suitcase inch by slow inch, pushing past crowds, glancing at the time to make sure you still have enough minutes to run to your terminal; or alternatively, spending watching the minutes tick by on an uncomfortable airport seat, knowing you could have gotten an extra hour of sleep.
Meldassi created CyBusy to tell passengers how busy Cyprus airports are, and how early to arrive before your flight; after the idea for the website came to him through his own experiences as a frequent traveler.
He noticed that the airport busyness and the right time to arrive vary significantly from one flight to another, telling en.philenews that sometimes the airport is relatively quiet, and other times it gets quite busy, he said. Most flight information is about the flights themselves, he continued, and could not find a simple way to answer the question that truly matters to the passenger: “What should I expect at the terminal at the time I arrive?”
Meldassi explains the forecasting algorithm as “a weather forecast for the airport”. The website uses available data and a forecasting model to estimate what passengers are likely to experience over the next few hours and days.
The algorithm analyses scheduled flights and estimates the expected passenger volume for each flight while taking different factors that affect demand into account, he continued. He told en.philenews that passenger’s likely time of arrival at the terminal is just as important as how many passengers are expected to fly.
He said that the model effectively creates an estimated ‘wave’ of passenger arrivals during the hours leading up to departure, and additionally can identify periods when significantly higher congestion is likely to develop due to ‘waves’ from different flights overlapping.
The model uses this information to provide a congestion forecast for the next 72 hours, and passengers can search for their specific flight in order to receive a recommendation on when to arrive at the airport, Meldassi said. He added that as more data is collected, the model will improve.
The project was developed solely by Meldassi, and went live near the end of September 2026, he said. He also told en.philenews that as a lawyer, it was interesting to see how modern technology, including artificial intelligence, can help turn ideas into a working product.
One of the most challenging parts, he said, was understanding when passengers tend to arrive before their flights and how the waves from different departures overlap. Meldassi said he is improving the algorithm through new data and feedback from users.
He told en.philenews that it is important that CyBusy is free and accessible to everyone. Passengers at the airport can also anonymously report the level of congestion they are experiencing to help other users, he continued.
Meldassi said that he has received feedback and ideas from users that have helped develop new features on the site, and that travelers were finding the website organically through google searches and AI tooks.
For now, Cyprus is the focus, though there is certainly potential for the website to go global, Meldassi said. He also told en.philenews that his priority is to make CyBusy as accurate and useful for passengers flying from Larnaca and Paphos airports before rushing to expand to dozens of destinations at once.
Find CyBusy here.
