Check in Nightmares

2nd Aug 2011

Oh no! A huge check-in queue at 5am at Phuket International Airport after too many farewell drinks the night before.

Every traveler's nightmare, especially at great tourist destinations like Phuket with its large family groups (avoid getting behind that family of six) large bags and grumpy people not wanting to leave our island paradise for the drudgery and miserable weather at home.

Fear not, check-in queuing help is at hand - although PIA customers may have to wait a little longer than other airports around the world.

Anxious to reduce queuing times - one of the major complaints travelers have about air travel - airlines are investing heavily in new technology aimed at drastically reducing waiting time to, well, virtually zero. Latest figures show investment in IT expenditure at airports rose to 3.4% in 2009, up from 2.7% the previous year.

Qantas, the Australian national carrier, is leading the way with its Q Card, a intelligent computer chip frequent flyer card, that enables a passenger to check-in themselves and their baggage with simple swipes of the card. With one touch passengers - at this stage only domestic Australia passengers - will be able to check in within seconds.

The card will also be a permanent boarding pass. For baggage, passengers will also receive a Bag Tag, a permanent bag tag they can attach to their luggage. The technology weights and checks in luggage with self service kiosks at the airport equipped with bag tagging, printing excess baggage payment collection data and fast pass functionality.

This is a long way from 1946 when a leading airline chairman in the United States at the time said that passengers do not always want to book but simply arrive at the airport and catch the next service. Well, 65 years later that is becoming a reality.

It may take a while to arrive at PIA as it is a small airport undergoing significant infrastructural change and such technology is probably best suited to more business oriented airports, but if the Bar Coded Boarding Passes (BCBP) project of the International Air Transport Association (IATA) the airline industry body, reaches its goal of covering all 2400 airports worldwide, then it will arrive.

Already Garuda, Indonesia's national airline long derided for its poor safety record, but undergoing a renaissance under Chief Executive Emirsyah Satar, is fully BCBP compliant apart from three airports it flies to. China and India, with 131 and 75 airports respectively, are major targets for BCBP.

The revolution in boarding pass technology has been compared as changing from VHS to DVD because of the extreme difference in quality. These days there is virtually no difference between scanning from a mobile phone or a piece of paper onto a bar code (as opposed to a magnetic stripe, the 'old' technology). Bar codes are also considered more secure and harder to fake than magnetic stripes.

And in keeping with today's 'i' generation, Malaysian Airlines has already introduced iPad check in at five kiosk terminals at Kuala Lumpur Sentral, a sophisticated rail transit hub in KL city serving the airport. The iPads help with booking flights, find departure times and assist with check-in the same way mobile phones do.

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