Airlines Must Use Tools To Speed Boarding

<B>Airlines Must Use Tools To Speed Boarding</B>

Expediting the process of identifying and boarding passengers is an uphill battle for the airlines. In 2000, for the ninth consecutive year, the industry carried a record number of domestic passengers, with little or no room at many popular airports for a corresponding expansion of ticket counter space or boarding gates.

Passengers arriving at airports find themselves waiting for increasingly long periods of time to check baggage and obtain boarding passes. Operational delays caused by aircraft waiting for passengers stuck in queues compound the problem, delaying subsequent flights elsewhere in the system and often causing cancellations.

Airlines are attacking the problem by attempting to reduce the number of customers that are forced to wait in line at a ticket or gate counter. To do so, airlines are introducing technology that offers flyers the ability to print their own boarding passes and avoid the long lines. Passengers can obtain their boarding passes and receipts from self-service kiosks upon arrival at many airports, or over the Internet before leaving for the airport.

Some airlines offer kiosks that provide a range of additional services that must otherwise be handled by an agent, such as the ability to check luggage, select seat assignments, add a frequent flyer number, and purchase tickets and upgrades. Delta Air Lines and US Airways kiosks pay special attention to their corporate customers by applying negotiated discounts to tickets purchased on their shuttle routes.

It is the kiosks of Northwest Airlines, however, that provide passengers with possibly the most welcomed functionality: automatic rebooking and issuing new boarding passes in the event that a flight is canceled. According to Jackie Astleford, director of e-commerce at Northwest, other airline kiosks require passengers booked on a canceled flight to wait in line to see an agent. Northwest kiosks seamlessly issue a new boarding pass, thereby reducing long lines, customer dissatisfaction and further operational delays.

Continental and Alaska Airlines lead the industry in kiosk ubiquity. Both have installed the machines in nearly every domestic airport they serve, as well as other locations where their customers might be found--Alaska has placed kiosks in hotels, parking lots and rental car facilities, and Continental even has installed one in Houston City Hall.

Last year, Alaska and then Northwest expanded the checkin process even further, enhancing their Web sites to enable their customers to select a seat and print their domestic boarding passes from home and business computers without any special software or hardware. The service is available less than 24 hours and more than an hour prior to the flight, and allows flyers to reduce to the bare minimum the amount of time they spend at the airport. Passengers who need to check luggage do so at curbside, and those without can go directly to the boarding podium.

In the most recent development, British Airways announced this month that members of its frequent flyer program departing from the United Kingdom now can select their seats and check in using their WAP-enabled phones. Once at the airport, passengers collect their boarding passes from a BA kiosk, leave their luggage at a fast bag-check and may proceed directly to the boarding podium.

Enabling flyers to print their own boarding passes already has discernably reduced airport queues. Web checkin, despite its infancy, is already the method of choice for one out of every 20 customers of Alaska Airlines. And Continental estimated that 18 percent of its passengers check in using its kiosks, the highest percentage in the domestic industry. A contributing factor to Continental's success might be that they were the first to install kiosks in April 1995, so their customers have had the longest amount of time to familiarize themselves with the technology.

Perhaps five years from now, Alaska will lead the industry in Web checkins for the same reason.

Self-checkin can offer immediate results to an airline and its customers. Over the past three months, US Airways installed newly developed kiosks at New York LaGuardia, Boston Logan and Reagan National, and found that more than 10 percent of its customers were using the machines to check in. Given these opportunities to reduce lines at airports, it is not surprising that nearly every major airline is scrambling to develop or enhance kiosks and Web checkin.

Many airlines, however, have not given their flyers the flexibility to skip airport queues. The customers of Southwest and American Airlines, for example, currently have no other choice but to wait in line at the airport to receive their boarding passes.

Airlines at the vanguard of technology have demonstrated a number of welcome advances that allow customers to improve their airport experience, relieve pressure on airline staff and improve operational performance. All airlines should undertake to develop these new processes, make them readily available, promote them and show their customers how to use them. If given the right tools, it has been demonstrated that people will start to adopt them.

<I>Brendan Sherlock, recently an e-commerce project manager with US Airways, is currently an e-commerce consultant based in the Cayman Islands. His e-mail address is [email protected].