Self-service kiosks are starting to change the airport environment, led by a surge of installations among the major US carriers keen to cut both lines and costs
Kiosks, the automated self-service check-in devices, have begun to tame the winding lines of passengers at Atlanta's Hartsfield International Airport. At its hub here, Delta Air Lines now has some 100 check-in kiosks, where customers can get a boarding pass, print a bag tag or choose a new itinerary.
Delta's Atlanta installation is not the first kiosk deployment, a title held by hi-tech pioneer Alaska Airlines. Nor is it the only such migration toward automating the front-end of the airport. Many of the US majors, including fellow cash-strapped giant American Airlines, have highlighted self-service check-in technology as a part of their cost restructuring efforts in a weaken revenue environment. Others such as Continental, Northwest, United Airlines and US Airways have also deployed kiosks throughout their systems.
At the same time, kiosks are spreading rapidly through Europe and Japan, and more recently to the Middle East, although self-service check-in for international travel has challenges of its own.
What Delta's move does represent is the largest commitment so far by a network carrier to the kiosk technology. Coming when some question the future dimension of hub airports, it represents so deep a financial and even cultural commitment that the transformation of the airport can now be called a major tactic in airline strategy.
David Melnik, founder of Florida-based kiosk manufacturer Kinetics, says that "passenger self-service is the core" of the airport process, making it a ripe candidate for the process re-engineering that is changing airline structures and organisations. His firm counts nine of the 15 largest carriers as customers. Melnik says: "The hub-and-spoke system is not going to go away, so making hubs manageable for the passenger is going to be a key way for an airline to differentiate itself to the public and get some of the efficiencies it needs to compete with point-to-point, low-cost carriers."
For the people leading the Delta effort, the project is more than a question of technology. Rich Cordell, Delta senior vice-president for airport customer services calls it a "transformation" and one that "not only pushes technology closer to the airport's front doors", but also changes the human role - that which front line employees play in the airport.
"In the past, the airport employee has had an eighth-of-an-inch of wood between them and the public, and theirs has been a basically passive position, waiting for people to come an seek their assistance. Now, it is changing as the airport service agent goes out on the other side of the counter and proactively approaches the customer, asking if they know about the kiosk, guiding them to it and being ready to assist them at the kiosk," says Cordell. "Separating the kiosk-ready customer from those who need more time also allows the agents who remain behind the wooden barrier to use their advanced skills. It is a new dimension of customer interaction."
Cutting costs and trimming headcount is not the central goal, although the airport advances should help save Delta at least $160 million through to the end of 2005, says Cordell. Some jobs will be lost, he says, but the most important advantage of the airport transformation is that it helps regain and maintain a productivity advantage that Delta, non-unionised save for its pilots, has had in the past. At Alaska Airlines, the first to deploy kiosks, cutting payroll was not the original goal, although it probably has kept the airline from having to hire more people, says an Alaska spokesman.
Delta's $30 million system-wide project, slated for completion by September, has been rolled out in 29 airports, including hubs in Cincinnati and Salt Lake City. Other business destinations will be next, such as Boston, Chicago, Dallas/Fort Worth, Los Angeles and New York JFK. Cleveland, Newark, San Francisco and Seattle.
Kiosks can offer services for interline e-ticketing, which American and United have advanced, and for alliance ticketing. As Delta and its new partners Continental and Northwest airlines begin co-locating airport facilities this year, the kiosks will allow check in for their codeshare flights.
Rob Maruster, Delta director of airport customer service, strategy, planning and development, says the airline has adopted an 80/20 rule that aims for kiosks to handle 80% of all transactions, leaving more complicated ones to other channels. Delta has a list of specific transactions that it says are handled more quickly by remote reservations agents than agents behind airport counters. Maruster calls the approach "mass customisation". As the roving agents direct passengers to a kiosk or phone, "we have seen an average 30% jump in usage of preferred (and lower-cost) channels". As public awareness spreads, kerbside check-in has also increased.
Agent role
Delta has taken a page from the Alaska Airlines textbook, adding phone banks near the check-in machines as Alaska has done. Phone banks adjacent to or located with the kiosks, dubbed Delta Direct, are an important component of the airport initiative and bring reservations and sales forces into the airport. The phones, which eventually will number above 400 across the 81 Delta stations, connect passengers at the kiosks to agents trained to handle complex ticketing changes and transactions. Passengers pick up their boarding passes at printers near the phone banks.
Maruster says the project includes enhanced gate readers to update itineraries and boarding passes for connecting passengers whose second flight was changed or cancelled due to weather or other delays. "The gate readers in effect are mini-kiosks out on the concourse", he says. "With the enhanced gate readers, we have much more reservations capacity than we ever have had at the airport and more ability to deal with interrupted operations".
Jack Walsh of Alaska, the pioneer since 1996, says that kiosks, which it calls Instant Travel Machines, form the centrepiece of Alaska's airport of the future project, an integrated check-in and baggage checking area in Anchorage, Alaska, that will eventually be tried in other airports. Walsh says four of the check-in points at Anchorage recently processed 100 passengers from two tour buses in 17 minutes.
"At some point the number of kiosks stops growing and stabilises, and we can adjust it up or down as patterns dictate," says Walsh. The count is now at 375 for the AlaskaAir Group, including regional operator Horizon Airlines, with usage at 40-70%. Alaska's manageable size and simplified route system made it an easy laboratory for the technology, while Delta's project brings the kiosk approach to more traditional airlines.
Maturing technology
However, Melnik of Kinetics believe that the technology is maturing: "Now we are past the early adopter stage and going to widespread installation." Northwest usage figures demonstrate the speed of public acceptance. Northwest began self-service check-in in 1997 at its Minneapolis/St Paul hub, and now has 645 check-in devices at 150 airports and will have 109 more by year-end. By May 2001, just over 20% of Northwest passengers were using self-service check-in, a rate that grew to 34% by May 2002 but which has now passed 50% systemwide.
Al Lenza, Northwest's vice-president of e-commerce and distribution, says that at some airports, usage is up to almost 75%. At Continental, with almost 700 kiosks, more than a million passengers a month, about 62% of passengers within the USA, use the eService centres. United has checked in more than 10 million passengers since July 2001; it will add a significant international feature in August. At US Airways, which has nearly doubled its number of kiosks this year to 419, over half of the passengers are using kiosks.
Meanwhile, at Delta, overall kiosk usage has soared, from 200,000 check-ins in 2001 to 7.4 million last year. It was posting new records in July and may reach 20 million kiosk check-ins during the current calendar year. Even that is a short-term goal, as is the gradual adaptation of the kiosk technology to international travel, says Charles Sander, Unisys managing partner for airports.
Under the IATA Simplifying Passenger Travel initiative, the industry will eventually tackle issues such as identification, international documentation, facilitation and even fee-collection.
Further integration with the security function is also ahead. Maruster predicts: "Someday, the most frequent flyer will be able to say: All I want to take to the airport is my thumb. And they'll be able to do that. We'll read his thumb, verify his identity and pull up his itinerary and print out a boarding pass."
The kiosks are already spreading around the world. In July Gulf Air announced that it has become the first Middle East airline to adopt electronic kiosk technology. Supplied by IBM, the units are sited in the international airports of Abu Dhabi, Muscat, and Bahrain, linked back to the Amadeus departure control system.
Expanded role
John Dungan of ARINC, a major player in kiosk technology, sees the real future in moving beyond the relatively straightforward functions now performed by kiosks. "The applications are not complex by choice. Airlines have made a decision to limit the number of options because they want to keep lines moving, which would not happen if a customer could spend a lot of time at the check in kiosks, checking his account, planning ahead and the like," says Dungan. "Eventually, you will see kiosks at the gate area for people who have already been processed, where they do the more time-consuming transactions such as account maintenance. That presents a host of marketing opportunities."
Looking ahead, Sander says that kiosks will become a more important customer satisfaction tool "when they are integrated into the security process, when they can start giving customised information to the passenger about the flight time - and also give real-time information to the security people that will let them react to crowd levels and move staff".
Sander adds that "so many of these uses are easy to see, but we are not there yet. Airports have just started in the past few years to move beyond being an edifice and into becoming a service centre". The kiosk, he says, will help bring them into the next age.
REPORT BY DAVID FIELD IN ATLANTA
Source: Airline Business
