The Airport IT Trends Survey 2011, a joint ACI, Airline Business and SITA survey, confirms the continued expansion of passenger self-service.
The survey shows top investment priorities focus around improving customer service, with passenger self-service remaining a key part of airports’ investment strategy. In line with this strategy, airports continue to invest in mobile services for their passengers. Similarly, social media integration to support customer service also remains important to airports.
Passenger self-service continues to grow. Adoption of check-in kiosks has already reached a high global penetration. Somewhat surprisingly 53% of the airports are still planning to increase the number of check-in kiosks, despite the maturity of online check-in and the surge in mobile check-in. This is possibly due to some regions ‘catching up’ with those who have been using kiosks for over a decade.
Other kiosk figures show that 25% of airports surveyed plan to introduce more common use kiosks for other usage including transfers, bag recovery and information, 13% do not have common use and have no plans to implement, and 3% plan to keep the same number of CUSS kiosks but change their use.
Airports also plan to extend the self-service concept to other passenger touchpoints to help improve performance and speed of passenger handling throughout the airport.
Common bag-drop locations also beginning to feature on the airport self-service wish list. Over the next three years, 47% of airports plan to implement common bag-drop locations.
The adoption of e-gates is still in its infancy, with current implementation under 10%. eGates are used for several tasks including self-boarding and border control (inbound and outbound). However, airports continue to show interest in introducing e-gates by 2014 to reduce queues and speed up passenger processing, with the largest airports leading the e-gate adoption.
The survey covers airports representing around 43% of total passenger traffic and includes more than two-thirds of the top 100 airports by revenue.
For further details see:
www.flightglobalshop.com
www.sita.aero/surveys
