Airport of the Future

“Check-in takes too long. It causes too much stress. Our customers know what they want: speed and ease,” Joyce told the NAPC.
“We all know that time is the new luxury. Convenience offers the edge. And getting there and home again with ease represents the ultimate advantage for the corporate traveller.”

Addressing this, the airline is planning later this year to roll out what it calls a ‘next generation check-in’. “Next-generation check-in is all about responding to our customers’ desire for a seamless airport experience, characterised by speed and ease,” Qantas’s executive manager customer and marketing Lesley Grant told Australian Aviation.

Underpinning the initiative will be the adoption of new technology to speed up airport check in processes, including the use of smart cards and radio frequency identification (RFID). Qantas says that it has been developing the system in collaboration with IBM.

Under the new approach to check in, Qantas Frequent Flyers with Silver or higher status issued with new cards fitted with smart chips.

These will be used as a permanent boarding card with the chip will store all booking and passenger information. Passengers will then use dedicated check-in readers around the terminal concourse to complete check in.

“The personal boarding pass will be a guarantor of recognition, ease and speed through all the airport processes,” said Joyce.

As well as the smart boarding card, the same passengers will also be issued with RFID tags, which will be placed in checked baggage and effectively replace the need for paper bag tags. Checked baggage will then be able to simply be put on a belt, where an RFID interrogator will read the information and send the bag accordingly. Potentially, it will also help to cut down ‘misreads’ of bag tags by barcode scanners, helping to reduce the incidences of lost luggage.

While the next generation check in will be optimised for those travellers who hold Frequent Flyer status, Joyce says that other travellers will also benefit from the changes. “Our Bronze Frequent Flyers and non-frequent flyers will also see significant upgrades to their check-in arrangements with hosted kiosks and rapid bag drop,” said Joyce.

Overall, the goal of the airline is to halve the time taken to check in passengers. In time, this could reduce the closeout time, meaning that passengers will not have to spend as much time at an airport before boarding their flight.

Qantas says that as well as the speed which passengers will be able to complete their check in, it will also free up airport staff to offer more personalised service to passengers. “This revolution will enable our employees to focus less on process and more on customer care,” said Joyce.

“In the long term, it’s about enabling us to put people where they really matter: we are provisioning for long term growth, both in the airline and in the number of ways we serve our customers,” he added.

However, the announcement by Joyce was greeted with suspicion from the Australian Services Union, which represents Qantas’s customer service staff. “The proposal has potential wide ranging effects on jobs, work, occupational health and safety and earnings; not to mention how this is actually going to make check-in faster!” The union wrote in a bulletin to members issued on November 12.

Ironically, the day after the announcement when Qantas executives met with ASU officials to talk further about the proposal, Qantas’s global check in system crashed, forcing staff to manually check in passengers, which the union says exposes a potential weakness in the airline’s plans to use more electronic systems.

However, Grant notes that the airline plans to put the system through its paces before it is rolled out, with a thorough evaluation based on a number of criteria to take place before it is rolled out.

Still, the pace of the upgrade is moving fast, with the first implementation set to roll out in Perth Airport from mid-year, where Qantas has also been involved in a major upgrade to its busy and constrained terminal. “It is expected the initial development of technology and implementation for the first port, Perth, will cost approximately $40 million,” said Grant.

Following this, the upgrade will then be rolled out at Sydney towards the end of the year and Melbourne in early 2011. Adelaide, Brisbane and Canberra are also expected to follow in 2011. Qantas has not yet identified if it will add it to other ports in the network.

While it hasn’t been implemented yet, Qantas says that it has already received a positive response to the concept. “The response from customers, in our market research, to this major innovation has been overwhelmingly positive,” said Grant.

With Qantas facing more competition, particularly from Virgin Blue’s push into the business market, the airline notes that it is aimed at premium travellers who have a premium on their time. “The changes will provide new added services for our Frequent Flyers, particularly business travellers, who are time poor and looking for ease and efficiency when they fly,” said Grant.

Joyce also told reporters at the luncheon that the airline is also examining other ways to cut down wasted time at the airport. “After your flight, there is still another clear point of pain, which is baggage collection. We are working on a separate project to improve that process too, cutting the time-lag from disembarkation to baggage pick up and speeding you on your way faster than ever.”

Similarly, it is also targeting improvements in security screening, which has been a major bottleneck at a number of airports around the country. “We all know security is vital and none of us will tolerate any compromise here. So as part of the project we are developing new technologies and associated processes to speed up the security process without compromising our rigorous security protocols,” said Joyce.

As the airline works to reduce wasted time for passengers and make their journey easier, the concept appears to also have operational benefits. In particular, it appears that as check in will be more efficient that more passengers will be able to be processed and board their flights quicker. Ultimately, this could allow for greater passenger and aircraft movements through the terminals, allowing the airline to use the terminals more efficiently.

Similarly, other airlines have built the case for investing in web check in and kiosks on gaining such efficiencies to build their capacity. This will be particularly important at airports where there are limits to the physical expansion of the terminal.

In any case, Joyce says that the changes are major, and are reflective of a Qantas which embraces the future. “We are pushing the boundaries here and we will obviously be working in close concert with various regulatory and other authorities and partners in the aviation industry. But we are not afraid to step into the future and I’ve asked our people to work to an ambitious timetable.”

However, with similar systems in use by other carriers, such as Air New Zealand, it appears that it will be down to Qantas to make sure that the rollout of the Airport of the Future goes as smoothly as possible, otherwise it risks tarnishing the premium image it is trying to gain through the exercise.