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“Give control to the passenger,” saysMayer. “If the passenger wants to vent,give them a person to vent to.” Hertoolkit includes Internet and kiosk technologies designed to bring self-serv-ice to the departure side of the travelexperience and to a lesser extent to thearrival side. “Companies are just gettingtheir arms around the departure side,”she observes.

For airlines, the combination of e-

tickets, Internet and kiosk-based self-service check-in has been a jackpot. Forexample, e-tickets cost around $1 toprocess versus $10 for paper ones,according to IATA. The associationreported that one “major European air-line” slashed its expenses by nearly $200 million a year after investing $75million in automated Web check-inand cutting back its call center staffingin several European countries.

Add to thatthe savings gen-erated by pas-senger self-serv-ice check-in andthe impetusfrom a coststandpointbecomes moreobvious.Traditional in-person airport

check-in costsabout $3.62 pertransaction

hil i

self-service kiosk reduces that to 52cents; surfing the Internet to check inand print boarding cards before arrivin

at the airport cuts the transaction costto 16 cents, according to SITA.British Airways is banking on the

synergies: When the carrier opens itsnew consolidated Terminal 5 at LondonHeathrow in 2008, self-service systems will outnumber people-managed sys-tems, says John Lampl, spokespersonfor the Americas. The layout of the ter-minal itself was created to speed up thedeparture side of the travel experience,optimizing movement between kiosksand bag drop areas, which will use

“lifts” rather than traditional conveyorbelts behind the check-in counters.SITA is providing the kiosks while BA is developing the software. The airlinealready is beginning to make the transi-tion, having implemented across-the-board self-service check-in for cus-tomers traveling on intra-UK flightsfrom April 25.

BA currently has online check-in forall of its gateways and as a result wasable to close its call center in Toronto.It will shutter its call centers in theCaribbean and Belfast as more peoplebegin using the online services. “Thebiggest problem is when people changereservations,” Lampl says. “That can’tbe done online. You have to call and areal person has to make those changes.”BA “prefers” that people use its auto-mated equipment but that is not man-dated, he adds.

Polar Opposite With all of its BA-owned equipment, T5 is somewhat the

polar opposite of the trend elsewheretoward common-use self-service. WithCUSS, an airport or ground handler

h d i ll h W b i f

IT PASSENGERS

W

HEN CATHERINE MAYER FOUND

herself waiting in an airline customer

service line to find out why her lug-

gage didn’t show up after an interna-

tional flight in early April, she knew there had to be

better way. In fact, she knew exactly what that way

should be. Mayer is VP-airport services for SITA,

which is at the forefront of an industrywide push to

accelerate passenger self-service options.

Power to the

PeopleB Y J O H N C R O F T

t o s : S I T A



structure and kiosks to allow for self-service check-in, while airlines developtheir own software applications. Some

providers offer the service free, otherscharge a fee.In early April, ground handler

Swissport International rolled out atNew York JFK Terminal 4 its brandedCUSS check-in kiosks, a product itoffers in partnership with SITA.“What’s really exciting with Swissport isthat ground handlers are kind of threat-ened by self-service,” says AlexRickards, SITA’s point man for globalrelationships with Swissport. For SITA,the year-old partnership provided a

means for potentially gaining a pres-ence in the handler’s vast ground net- work of 170 airports in 40 countries.

For smaller airlines, Rickards saysCUSS means the cost of buying intoself-service can be lower because the car-rier pays only a portion of the overallcost in addition to providing its ownapplication software. Swissport’s CUSSalso is installed at Basel Airport. At JFK,Swissport reported that 40% of e-ticket-ed passengers used the devices in thefirst few days of operation, “an excep-tionally high acceptance rate.” TheSITA-provided kiosks and applicationsare designed to handle a maximum of 60 airlines though the system currently is programmed for 12, says Rickards.

ARINC has a similar CUSS offering,primarily in partnership with kiosk-maker IBM. The company in Marchannounced an installation of its iMUSEsystem at Portland International; two of the airport’s international carriers hadbeen using the equipment for self-serv-

ice check-in. John Dungan, director-global prod-uct management for ARINC, says its

d i i ll d 13 i i l d

ing some 200kiosks at LasVegasMcCarranInternational,and businessis “steadily growing.” Henotes thatsmaller air-ports areinterested inCUSS as aspace-saver. Westchester

County Airport in New York purchased ARINC’s CUSS to reduce the numberof kiosks from eight to four. For air-

lines, shared resources can help at non-hub facilities. Common-use equipment“makes a lot of sense for carriers with alot of spoke airports, where justifying[the costs of] self-service may be diffi-cult,” Dungan states.

The increasing dependence on self-service has made kiosks a critical playerin the airport environment. “Kiosks arean absolute necessity to de-peaking,”says James Burke, VP-IT and telecom-munications for the Greater Toronto Airports Authority. “Major airlines are

looking at a lot of extra systems goingin.” Toronto has CUSS kiosks fromSITA in addition to SITA-managedservices to maintain the units. The air-port will be adding about 100 new units to its refurbished terminals overthe next year.

Theresa Heinz, VP-business develop-ment for NCR subsidiary Kinetics, amanufacturer of kiosks and self-servicetechnologies, explains that the deviceshave evolved from “appliances withmagnetic card printers” 12 years ago tohighly capable tools today. They canoffer international check-in, passengerreaccommodation and the ability forairlines to sell seating upgrades and col-lect baggage fees. SITA reports that oneEuropean carrier gained a 1.5%increase in revenue over the period of afew months by offering ticket upgradeson the kiosks.

Kinetics provides Web-based hard- ware and software check-in applicationsfor US Major airlines including Delta

Air Lines, Continental Airlines andNorthwest Airlines, and to a lesserextent for carriers in Canada, CentralA i d A li Th

recently added passport readers to1,000 kiosks for Delta at four US air-ports, allowing for self-service interna-tional check-in. All of Delta’s US kiosk will be equipped with readers by yearend. Its self-service check-ins fordomestic flights increased 10% lastyear, with 28 million passengers usingkiosks to obtain boarding passes.

Kinetics President Herve Muller saysthe company has 5,600 kiosks deployedin the US and will have 6,000 in placeby year end. “As that [number] grows, we also see self-service growing outsideof the airport,” he adds. Kinetics has apilot program in place at “major hotelchains” employing hospitality kiosksthat can be used for hotel check-in and

checkout as well as airline check-in.

Tail Art Frontier Airlines selectedKinetics as its kiosk and applicationprovider to expand its self-service offer-ings from meager beginnings at DenverInternational. According to spokesper-son Joe Hodas, Frontier has been test-ing eight self-service kiosks for twoyears and will be expanding the airline-owned assets at DEN “significantly” in June, followed by a rollout at “busierstations around the country.” In addi-

tion to the typical kiosk functions likeseat selection and number of bags tocheck, Frontier’s system will show theflight’s tail art, tying into the carrier’sbranding program—each aircraft has adifferent animal decorating its verticalstabilizer. Hodas says counter staffing will not change, with agents splittingduty between counters and kiosks.

At Alaska Airlines, according to SITAaverage check-in time dropped from 20min. per person to 5 min. after self-serv-ice kiosks were installed in 2001. Afterincorporating self-service bag dropsmore recently, check-in time dropped tounder 2 min. Though SITA previously built its own kiosk devices, the companylast year signed an agreement withColorado-based Kiosk InformationSystems to supply its systems.

Some airlines are turning to kiosks tohandle their scheduling anomalies.Heinz says some Majors have purchasedtracking systems that “watch the trafficsituation” during a flight and rebook

passengers if a disruption occurs. Onlanding, kiosks are used to obtain new boarding passes or change flights. She

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a chance for additional customer servicethrough amenity coupons. She esti-mates that 35%-40% of Kinetics kiosksat this point have the functionality.

Dungan says some carriers are exper-imenting with mobile kiosks that canbe placed on a cart and rolled out sothat passengers can handle rebookingthemselves. Mayer says certain airlines,including American, have added VOiPphones to their dedicated kiosks so pas-sengers can call for assistance.

The reliance on the machines ismaking reliability all the more crucial.“Kiosks have become mission critical,”says Muller. “A robust design is needed, with remote monitoring, software dis-tribution and help desks, and you have

to have the ability to fix them quickly.”Kinetics offers aftermarket support on asystemwide basis but he declines to dis-close its customers.

Kiosk Information Systems ExecutiveManager Craig Keefner notes thatseemingly insignificant items can

impact kiosk reliability and aftermarketcost: Increasing the size of the paperroll for the printer can mean sending atechnician out every 32 days instead of every 24, for example. “That’s a lot of service calls saved per year.”

For CUSS devices, first-generationsoftware sometimes has been problem-atic. Dungan says varied interpretationsof the CUSS standards developed by IATA have led to costly issues wheredifferent airlines’ software applications won’t interface correctly with hardwaredevices like printers. Though the issuesare worked out in testing before themachines go live, he says the processcan be costly and time-consuming.

Along with perfecting today’s sys-

tems, service providers are experiment-ing with the next generation. Mayersays current departure-side self-servicedevelopments are “just the tip of theiceberg.” SITA has been piloting fortwo years a program through whichpassengers can use mobile phones to

check in. By calling an airline’s auto-mated system, the traveler receives atext message barcode encrypted withcheck-in information and scans thephone at a kiosk equipped with a bar-code reader. The same process can beused at the security checkpoint and thegate. Although Lufthansa was the firstcarrier to test the system, followed by Air Canada and Singapore Airlines, noone has signed up. “It’s not really a costissue,” says Mayer, “it’s more of makingsure passengers are ready for it.”

For Mayer, having the ability to doautomated baggage reconciliation is anempowerment too long in coming.Though the airline on which she wastraveling was one of the 98% of carriers

that use a tracking and tracing databasedeveloped by SITA, she had to wait inline to have an airline employee enterthe same information into an onlinedatabase that she could have provided with her cellphone. “It’s not rocket sci-ence,” she says.