‘You’ve checked in, and printed your boarding card with your seat assignment online; fantastic. You then need to check your bag with an agent; go through passport control; join the queue at security; then present the boarding card and an ID when you board the plane. Each of these processes is being done in self-service mode somewhere in the world. We are trying to corral these to deliver a program to speed the progress of passengers through the airport.’
This is how Paul Behan, program manager for fast travel, at the International Air Transport Association in Geneva, talks about his mission.
Baggage, for example: you first need to register that you intend to check one, two or more bags, either on the Web or a self-service kiosk at the airport. Then you ‘self-tag’ your bags.
‘That’s what is happening in Scandinavia, Germany and Canada; getting the bag to the point ready to go,’ Behan says. ‘You still need an agent for airline liability and security sides, but you can cut the process to about 20 seconds as opposed to the couple of minutes it takes now. However, some pilots are going on in Europe, such as Schiphol, for a totally unmanned baggage drop facility.’
If your bags don’t make it to the other end, instead of standing in line for an agent, you will fill in the data at a kiosk, or an Internet work station, in the baggage hall, print a receipt, and leave without seeing anyone.
The next stage to printing out the boarding card at home will be to check in with your cell phone, or use it as a postbox for a Web check-in. Check in the night before and send it to your mobile. According to Behan, ten airlines enable mobile phone check-in with IATA bar-coded boarding passes.
Cell phones can lessen the misery of hanging around the airport waiting for a delayed flight.
Imagine a snow storm over Chicago with a hundreds of delayed or canceled flights; standing in line at the desk for an agent to help you.
‘We’re looking at mobile technology to send a message to the passenger saying, don’t turn up at the airport at two o’clock but at four; and by the way, here’s your new boarding pass. This is a reality today,’ Behan says. ‘You’ll also be able to use your mobile device as a boarding pass; saves you having to print a bit of paper.’
‘The next step is boarding the plane. In Japan, Scandinavia and Germany, they’re implementing self-boarding gates,’ Behan adds. ‘Think of your metro station. You’ll present your boarding pass either as a piece of paper or mobile with a bar code. There are some challenges with passport checks at the gate; but we are working on that.’
Baggage is the number one reason why travelers do not use self-service options, according to a survey by SITA, a Geneva-based airline communications provider, conducted at six of the world’s busiest airports.
SITA Air Transport World Passenger Self-Service Survey examined the attitudes and habits of a representative sample of the 232 million passengers who use seven international airports: Hartsfield-Jackson, Atlanta; Mumbai International; Charles-de-Gaulle, Paris; Moscow Domodedovo; Sao Paulo Guarulhos and Johannesburg. Interviews with 2,143 travelers representing more than 60 nationalities flying on more than 100 airlines were made at the departure gates during April and May 2008.
The survey confirms that self-service is part of full-service expectations; and airlines are responding with technology giving travelers greater convenience, with power to control their airport experience. Only price (70.5 percent) and flight schedule (63.1 percent) rank above ‘ability to make your own arrangements on the Web’ (42.5 percent).
Overall, 57.6 percent of respondents booked their flight on line, while 36 percent checked in on the Web or at a self-service kiosk. ‘Ease of use’ (72 percent) and ‘time saved’ (60 percent) were the most popular reasons for online booking - plus the fact that the Web makes comparison of the various options easier (56 percent).
‘Baggage is the reason stated by almost half (48.4 percent) of people as the reason for not using self-service check ins when it is available,’ says Dominique El Bez, SITA director, portfolio marketing, ‘seriously detracting from the passenger experience, and limiting the savings and efficiencies made possible by self-service technology. Addressing the baggage dilemma is a key milestone towards achieving our target of 80 percent self-service check-in.’
According to the survey, 47.8 percent of travelers would be willing to use both remote check-in and bag-drop services in the future, and 42.2 percent of them would be willing to pay for them.
A majority of respondents (66.7 percent) would welcome more online functions such as the ability to modify reservations. The ability to use kiosks for flight transfers would be welcomed by 53.8 percent, and for reporting lost baggage claims by 41.8 percent.
The number of travelers willing to use airline Web sites to frequently book other travel components, such as hotels and car rental, is expected to ‘almost double in the coming years’ from the present 11.2 percent.
‘Automated border control and security processing’ would be acceptable to 48.7 percent, while a ‘weighted average’ of 40 percent of travelers would accept the idea of airlines or airports using ‘location sensing technology to guide them through the terminal.’
This is ‘Big Brother’ territory. Radio Frequency Identification Tags linked with a network of high resolution CCTV panoramic cameras around an airport can track the location of any passenger with an accuracy of one square meter, enabling authorities to keep an eye on suspicious individuals, find lost children, ensure that passengers arrive at the gate in time to board their planes, and help evacuate airports in an emergency.
RFID chips work by emitting a short radio message when interrogated by an electronic tag reader. Passengers might be given a wrist band or a boarding pass embedded with a unique ID, cross-referenced to information on the reservations system, such as name and flight number.
The highest acceptance of the idea among respondents was in Sao Paulo (69 percent); the lowest in Paris Charles-de-Gaulle (four percent).
Two-thirds of business travelers have eavesdropped on someone else’s confidential conversations; over a third have caught sight of sensitive documents or information on laptops — and over ten percent admit that they have been used this information for their own business purposes, according to a survey of 1,000 frequent travelers in the United States and the UK.
The survey, commissioned by the Regus Group, a provider of serviced offices and business lounges for travelers around the world, is an ominous reminder of World War 2 posters — ‘Walls Have Ears: Careless Talk Costs Lives!’
In these intrusive times, we are involuntary eavesdroppers on fellow travelers ranting on cell-phones; and who can resist an inquisitive glance at someone’s open briefcase or laptop screen?
(’A guy in the next row was saying that Tom is leaving the company!’ ‘Wow, I wonder if Tom knows.’)
The survey found that 67 percent of British travelers have eavesdropped on someone else business conversation, versus 59 percent of Americans — and 35 percent of British (34 percent of Americans) have caught sight of sensitive company documents; 13 percent of British (19 percent of Americans) have been able to use the information they have overheard in public.
More traveling women (71 percent) listen to conversations than men (67 percent); but more men (39 percent) pry at private documents than women (29 percent).
David Porter, head of security and risk at Detica, specialist business consultants (www.detica.com), said, ‘The survey points to significant vulnerability in corporate security. I’ve overheard sensitive conversations in trains, bars, and restaurants — whether lawyers discussing client details or salespeople revealing key contacts. People seem to slip into a very casual security mindset when using laptops and PDAs. They naively think other people will not be interested or aware of what they are doing; in reality this could not be further from the truth.’
Kurt Mroncz, vice president, global sales at Regus,’ said, ‘Many companies don’t realize the staggering problems people face on the road, and the lengths they go to find a place to work or to have a private conversation. The survey shows that half of business travelers resort resorted to working in washrooms, bars and crowded restaurants, even park benches.’
Regus’ Business World program offers members access to over 950 business lounges around the world, to work in comfort and privacy. Gold membership (#199 a year) allows one to drop in to any lounge, connect your laptop to the Internet and take or make calls.
Security specialist Will Geddes, managing director of ICP Group (www.icpgroup.ltd.uk), offers the following security tips:
-Always have a password and pin number on your phone, so that it will automatically stop after a few minutes of non use; ‘absolutely critical, otherwise it’s like leaving your address book open, with all your passwords and phone numbers.’
-Avoid discussing confidential matters over the phone in a public place — and use code-names for projects and people.
-Make sure that your memory stick is password protected as well. You can now get biometric memory sticks with thumb print protection.
-Make sure the screen saver on your laptop goes into lock mode after 5 to 10 minutes, requiring you to enter the password for it to work again.
-Always delete text messages or e-mails on your phone or Blackberry, or get software to forward them to your e-mail back at the office. ‘There’s a lot of private information there; transfer it on.’
-Don’t take unnecessary things in your briefcase; only the stuff you really need for that trip; leave all personal things out. And keep documents in covered, unlabeled folders.
-Traveling without a laptop, you can access your office files by logging on to a service such as GoToMyPC (www.gotomypc.com) from any Internet-connected device — even a dumb terminal in a hotel lobby — and pick up work where you left off. The connection is secure, and it feels as though you are sitting in front of your own PC. But you must keep your home computer on, at least in ’sleep mode,’ while you are away.
‘I go into a VPN — virtual private network — to my office server remotely,’ Geddes says. ‘A lot of people in the financial services sector do this. It means I’m not holding anything locally, which is a potential risk, if I lose or break the laptop.’
-Consider having a separate laptop (and memory stick) that you use only for trips; and save documents on a memory stick rather than on the hard-drive.
-Don’t put your laptop or documents in the overhead bin above you, but one diagonal to you, so that when someone rummages in the locker, you can see what he or she is doing. People have had laptops stolen from overhead in business-class cabins.
Safeguarding private data from Big Brother is rather more daunting. Our telephone conversations and e-mails are routinely ’swept’ for certain key words or phrases, which may activate a closer surveillance. Reports that the U.S. government has plans to make random border searches of laptops, cell phones, PDAs and Blackberrys and copy or seize data has sent a chill through businesses and civil rights groups. Whether password protection could prevail is a moot point.