Transport yourself into the future

Imagine being able to choose your aircraft seat when you book your ticket on-line; only having to get to the airport an hour-and-a-half before an international flight; not having to queue to check-in; having an electronic luggage tag so your bag's whereabouts can be tracked; being able to waltz through immigration in moments by staring into a retina scanner; and, perhaps best of all, imagine paying lower air fares as well.

Sound too good to be true? Well it's what the International Air Transport Association (Iata) wants to see happening the next four or five years. Last November it launched a strategy called Simplifying the Business, which calls for a complete revamp of tickets, boarding, passes, check-ins and baggage handling.

And local travellers can take heart that Air New Zealand is among the airlines most energetically introducing those ideas.

Its group general manager airlines, Rob Fyfe, is enthusiastic about the way new technology is allowing him to streamline the travelling process and to reduce costs. "We are," he says, "very committed to the process."

Part one of Iata's masterplan is to eliminate paper tickets by 2007, a move expected to save airlines US$2.7 billion ($3.7 billion) a year, as well as making life easier for passengers.

At the moment that target seems a long way off - at present only 35 per cent of tickets worldwide are issued electronically - but the proportion has more than trebled in the past three years and the trend is accelerating.

New Zealanders have flocked to electronic tickets, attracted by the lower prices and the advantage of being able to book from home instead of having to visit a travel agent.

Already 95 per cent of Air New Zealand's domestic bookings are made electronically, and the airline encourages the use of electronic tickets on international flights where it is the sole carrier. It has just started negotiating with other airlines on inter-airline electronic ticketing, the first step being a deal with Air Canada.

"So," says Fyfe, "if you're doing a journey all the way with Air New Zealand and Air Canada you can have an electronic ticket all the way through."

That is likely to expand rapidly over the next few months. "We're committed within Star Alliance to having inter-airline electronic ticketing with all the alliance partners by the end of the year and that will cover the majority of our passengers," he says. "After that we'll just tick off the other airlines our passengers use in order of priority."

The enthusiasm for electronic tickets is at least partly because it is clumsy to get the financial information - especially the details about how the money from a journey involving more than one airline is to be shared - off the old paper coupons.

"It is," says Fyfe, rolling his eyes a little, "an absolute anachronism. All the ticket coupons from all round the world have to be collected up and sent to a processing centre, which in our case is in Fiji, where the information on them is physically transcribed into a computerised system." 

But, from the point of view of passengers, the great advantage of the change to electronic tickets is that they are the key to several other innovations. 

Part two of Iata's plan is wider use of the self-service kiosks already widely used by domestic passengers checking in at Auckland, Wellington and Christchurch airports. The big benefit of the kiosks is that they allow passengers to avoid those irritating check-in queues where you always get behind someone with a complex problem that takes an age to sort out.

But they also offer huge financial benefits to airlines because a self-service check-in is estimated to cost around 16USc (22c) compared with US$3.68 ($5) using staff. About half the domestic passengers checking in at the three main airports already use them. Air New Zealand hopes to be able to use kiosks for at least some international flights within the next year.

International flights, Fyfe says, are a little more complicated, because international kiosks will have to be able to check passports as well as tickets. But it can certainly be done and "we could also potentially have customers pay departure taxes at the kiosk".

Initially the kiosks will probably be able to cope only with people going to countries with which New Zealand has a visa-waiver programme. Foreign passports or visas will probably still require some level of human intervention.

Fyfe says automated check-ins for international flights will start with Tasman flights "because visa-wise that's fairly easy" and should begin within 12 months. Because of visa and security requirements "automated checking-in for all international flights is probably a couple of years away but not longer than that".

Iata also plans to kill off the traditional boarding pass. Instead, passengers of the future will probably select their seats when they book, or, as happens already with domestic flights, when they check in at the automated kiosks. And the information about seating and so on will be recorded in barcode form on the electronic ticket, or even on the screen of a mobile phone.

"We all take a boarding pass for granted," said Fyfe, "yet, to be honest, the only new information that sits on the boarding pass is the seat number and it tells the attendant at the gate you're entitled to have that seat."

There is, in fact, no reason why travellers should not choose a seat when they book and have the details recorded - probably in barcode form - on the electronic ticket. In future it may also be feasible to do that by using a mobile phone.

"You could," says Fyfe, "be driving from town and use your mobile to confirm your seat and flight, and you can have a barcode on the screen of your mobile, which you'll scan to board, so you won't even need a paper boarding pass or ticket."

It will still be necessary for passengers to register that they are ready to board, but that could probably be done by putting the barcode across a scanner in the departure lounge.

After that comes the question of baggage.

That is an area which airlines realise they will have to tackle, partly because, as Fyfe puts it, "if you've saved a lot of time by checking-in remotely it partly defeats the purpose if you then have to stand in a queue to check in your bags".

To overcome that the plan, passengers will take their bags to a kiosk, put them on a scale and use the barcode on the electronic ticket to scan in the necessary flight information. Out will pop a set of tags which passengers can attach to their bags which they then deposit in a loading area. Once again, no need to wait in the queue while people with too much luggage argue with the counter staff.

Airlines are keen to switch to electronic tags as part of that process in the hope of reducing the cost - both financial and in terms of goodwill - of lost baggage. In fact, of the 1.5 billion bags carried each year fewer than 1 per cent go astray, but that still costs around US$100 ($137) a bag or US$1 billion ($1.37 billion) worldwide.

Fyfe reckons that is probably only three or four years away. "There's already technology being used by freight companies which allows you to go on-line and see where in the world your parcel is, so it's just a logical extension of that."

The biggest difficulty, he says, will be getting airlines to agree on a uniform standard. "But the electronic tracking of bags has become essential for security reasons, so that has created a lot of impetus."

The next wave of change after that is likely to come from a combination of biometrics and proximity cards. Biometrics allow passengers to be positively identified through a palm print, fingerprint or retina scan and they are already being used on the US-Canadian border and at some airports in Europe so regular travellers can go through an automated clearance process.

Fyfe has already benefited from this technology and sees the scope for smoothing the travel process. "Because I'm a regular traveller to the US, I have a card which means I can take a special route through immigration, swipe the card, look in a retina scanner and effectively go straight through."

New Zealand passports are already among the most advanced in the world and they are likely to be among the first to incorporate biometric data to provide more reliable identification of the holder.

The benefit for passengers will be speedier immigration clearance, especially in countries like the US, which have been pushing hard to introduce biometric screening of visitors.

Proximity cards contain a chip that can be interrogated electronically while it is sitting in the owner's pocket. The technology is similar to that used on European toll roads.

For airlines, it offers the potential to record when a passenger arrives at the airport without the need for some sort of check-in. It would also allow passengers to get access to lounges without the need to produce a pass.

That technology is relatively new but already airlines are eyeing it eagerly. "We're certainly interested," says Fyfe, "because it offers the potential for huge savings in processing time."

In particular, if proximity chips were to be incorporated into passports - though there are privacy issues to be sorted out there - it would allow passengers to use a single document for both immigration and airline purposes.

All of this may sound a bit pie-in-the-sky, but Fyfe is adamant that it is not very far off for New Zealand.

"In terms of domestic and regional travel, where we can harmonise fairly easily, then I would think we could expect to have all this working seamlessly within a four-year time frame," he says.

"In terms of the global industry, it's probably more like five to 10 years, because there are a lot of airlines and they have different mandates."

For airlines the big pay-off from the new technology is cost saving. But what's in it for passengers? "A lot," says Fyfe.

The big gain will be faster processing time, which should allow airlines to reverse the steady lengthening of check-in times. "For international flights you used to have to check in two hours before departure, but now, because of security issues, it's recommended to be three hours.

"But I would like to think it's realistic that as we introduce these new systems and they are refined that we could get that back down to more like an hour-and-a-half."

In addition, greater use of electronics will also save money. "The faster the customers move through the airport the less it costs us to process them and that will ultimately get reflected in lower fares."

And on top of that the new technology is expected to improve security.

"The reason this has a lot of momentum," says Fyfe, "is that it offers something for everyone.

"For the customer there's time saving and greater reliability. For the airline it saves a lot of cost. And it's also better from a security point of view.

"It's a win-win-win situation. And when you get a positive motivation for everyone involved in the process then that's when things really start to happen."