One common piece of advice you'll get from an old-time business traveller with decades of flights under his belt is to never get mad at the person behind the airline counter. No matter how peremptory he or he is, being rude won't get you where you're going any faster.
But these days the best advice might be to avoid the counter altogether. And in some places you can.
Passengers at airports in Frankfurt and Munich and New Zealand can now board themselves, using bar-coded, kiosk-generated boarding passes that let them through unstaffed turnstiles.
In fact, within New Zealand, there aren't many human hold-ups any more. Air New Zealand's North American vice-president, Roger Poulton, says that for domestic flights, passengers sail through “almost people-less airports.”
According to a survey of about 4,500 frequent travellers across Canada and the United States by tech company NCR (which makes airport kiosks) and released at the end of June, 73 per cent of people said they would be more likely to choose an airline “that offered them greater control over managing their entire travel experience through self-service.”
Numbers like that airlines listen to.
Air Canada has been an industry leader with self-serve check-in kiosks. The machines have been around for 15 years or more, but for much of that time, they were nothing more than elaborate printers, allowing you to get your own boarding pass, which, if you only had carry-on bags, could save you a lineup. Air Canada’s kiosks let you print baggage tags (at Montreal, Toronto, Vancouver, Heathrow and de Gaulle), reschedule your same-day flight, pay for extra baggage and upgrade your seat. But the company has fallen behind in the most recent innovations.
In the U.S. now, you can do all this as well as buy your in-flight food or headphones and, at 35 airports, download movies and music for your trip or your airport wait. And you can often do it curbside or in the parking lot, without even having to negotiate the indoor crowds. In much of Europe, the kiosks can also read your passport.
“Customer demand for self-service options keeps evolving as technology progresses,” says Steve Lott, a spokesman for the International Air Transport Association (IATA). “The day is not that far away when passengers may not even come into contact with an airline or airport agent.”
And in case airline cost-cutting and increasing customer demand weren’t enough, IATA, which represents 93 per cent of the world’s airlines, has mandated that all members use bar-coded boarding passes by the end of this year, a move that will greatly increase the speed at which self-service options can be implemented worldwide.
IATA has also come up with what it calls a Fast Travel manifesto, a six-point plan to transform airports into self-serve operations: It wants passengers to be able to scan their own passports, check themselves in (and their bags), board the plane on their own, rebook their own flights and handle lost-luggage claims. In this last area, a pilot program is being tested at McCarran International Airport in Las Vegas. The pilot program involves bags being tagged with radio-frequency indentification computer chips to track movement from the consumer through screening and to the carrier within McCarran airport. In future, the hope is the chip technology will be expanded to allow passengers to track lost bags around the world, and easily order redelivery.
Now, if only those kiosks could handle security checks, airports might once again become gateways to travel rather than obstacles.
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Special to The Globe and Mail
Editor's note: The original version of the story indicated that McCarran airport is testing a program that tracks luggage around the world. This copy has been corrected.
