Tuesday, 3 November 2009 at 16:37
About 80 per cent of the world’s leading airport operators are moving towards self-service passenger check-in, according to the latest SITA Airport IT Trends survey released on Tuesday.
The trend follows the aviation industry’s recent switch to paperless transactions or e-ticketing, which has been deemed as a cost-effective and more convenient way of travelling.
“Airports are also recognising that passengers bypassing check-in counters may be faced with new bottlenecks and queues at baggage drop-off and security screening areas. As a result, airports are turning to various automation tools to track wait times at different checkpoints such as security and immigration. Of the respondents who said they will monitor wait times in the future, 60 per cent [said they] will use video analytics, 43 per cent will use RFID (radio frequency identification) and 27 per cent plan to use Bluetooth technology,” explains Catherine Mayer, SITA Vice President for Airports.
She added that online check-in is already being implemented by about 40 per cent of the world’s top 100 airports.
The survey mentioned that 63 per cent of all airports have check-in kiosks which will further increase to 90 per cent by 2012. When asked about their strategy for kiosk usage, most airports plan to increase the number of kiosks further, whether for check-in (44 per cent) or for new functionality (9 per cent) such as passport scanning (from 32 per cent today to 58 per cent by 2012) and bag-tag printing (from 17 per cent today to 51 per cent by 2012).
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