This article originally published in Self-Service World magazine's special section, FOCUS: Self-Service in Travel, March 2007.
Lord knows the kind of self-service some JetBlue and Delta passengers were contemplating recently.
The winter storm that walloped the northeast in February grounded hundreds of planes, but the snow arrived so quickly that many flights were cancelled between leaving the gate and reaching the end of the runway. Some jets even froze to the pavement, trapping hordes of unlucky travelers on the tarmac for 10 or more hours.
Chainsaw? Blowtorch? After more than 10 minutes at the gate, I'm ready to begin clawing my way out of an airplane, and if the claw is at the end of a hammer, so be it. Things begin to smell on a grounded airplane. The crying of children becomes more determined. The panting for nicotine from deprived smokers becomes more desperate.
Travel horror stories are as common as, well, travel horror stories. Even I tell them, but when I do, it's to fit in with grumpy road-warriors, to mask the fact that I still love to travel. The cool travelers, it seems, do nothing but gripe about it. Me, flying to London on business makes me a big shot. Most of my family is so rural, they're more likely to suffer from tractor lag.
One aspect of travel you don't hear so many complaints about these days is check-in. Self-Service World has covered it a great deal where it intersects with kiosk technology, and regular readers of this magazine and its online counterpart, SelfServiceWorld.com, know we celebrate self-service airline applications as a pioneer for the whole industry. In fact, only the ATM exceeds them in terms of helping usher in a new era in customer-facing technology and the public's willingness to use it.
After 9/11, the airlines were faced with tremendous economic challenges. Bookings were down significantly, and the cost of new security measures was enormous. Necessity, the craggy mother of all inventions, foisted upon the industry a voracious search for relief. Self-service significantly sated the appetite.
The remedy was so effective, it has helped lift the entire industry, and promises to keep airlines at the leading edge of the business-to-consumer intersection.
James Bickers, Self-Service World editor, wrote this just a few months ago in an online column:
For British Airways, self-service has been an unqualified success.
British trade publication Computing is reporting that BA saw 80 percent of its traffic go through self-service check-in. A company representative said that's well ahead of the company's schedule, as is the move to paperless ticketing, which is now at 90-percent customer-adoption rate.
Good news regarding airlines and self-service has been coming fast and furious in recent weeks; just a few short days ago, Air Canada announced that it was saving some major money through the use of self-service. (The company said it spends 16 cents to check in a traveler through a kiosk, versus $3 through a staffed counter.) And a recent report by SITA stated that the airline industry's move toward self-service is saving it billions of dollars.
Another aspect of the SITA survey predicted that aviation will become the world's first totally Internet-protocol-enabled industry.
"This year's Airline IT Trends survey provides the clearest evidence yet that the airlines will be the world's first fully Web-enabled industry," Paul Coby, SITA chairman, said in a release. "IP is the underlying communication technology that enables many new applications, such as online reservation systems, so it has brought a radical change to air travel, ever since SITA developed the first Internet booking engine just over 10 years ago. It is also driving the self-service business model, which is both convenient for passengers and helps airlines keep ticket prices down."
Bickers ended his piece with a question that becomes more relevant every day, and the silence meeting it becomes resoundingly loud: When will other industries, such as foodservice, step up with more self-service? The airlines have proved three things: Customers use it. Self-service saves the deployer money. And sometimes it takes a financial disaster to get a business off its keister. Let's hope that when it comes to other consumer-driven businesses, it doesn't take the third to reveal for them the first and second.
