No matter how much I travel and no matter how bad the airport travel experience is getting as a result of increased security, I still like airports and the walk from the taxi rank to the gate. Negotiating the various artificial obstacles erected to keep the bad guys out, I always bless the inventors of internet check-in as the little A4 sheet in my pocket allows me to bypass the check-in counters and even the self-check-in kiosks. Not to mention the airline ladies with steely eyes who always insisted in the past that my flight case be weighed. As it was always above the misery 6 kilos allowed by our favorite local airline, I had to resort to all kinds of tricks to make the bag loose weight (until I walked away from the check-in counter that is). This problem is now gone with internet check in but I keep wondering: if I went to the counter, would she again be difficult about the extra 2 kilos of gear, knowing full well that if I used their internet check-in facility, nobody would care about the bag (very few airlines actually weigh stuff at the gate unless it really looks huge or heavy or both). But I diverge…
Having gone through security, the airport with its concourses and shops and gates is suddenly open for me and I feel like a bird let out of its cage. Of course the feeling is false, just like the freedom of the bird that passes from the cage into the living room. So, I am free to do anything I like except that the airport, by design, arrangement and enforced routing tries to influence me to pass by the shops, the cafés and other places happy to exchange my euros for things I have absolutely no need for and the price of which is way above what the same stuff usually costs even on the high street, let alone an internet store.
So, I decide to pass and thread my way to the departure gate the number of which used to be printed on the boarding pass. But my fancy self-print pass was produced the day before and it advises me to consult the monitors in the departure area. I do as suggested, only to find that the common monitors spread throughout the concourse show no gate number… yet. Gate numbers are posted 30 minutes before boarding time, it says. Why is this? Because most airports earn a large part of their revenue from the concessions and they want to keep passengers in the shopping and dining area as long as possible to give them plenty of time to spend their hard-earned cash.
Of course for the airlines the exact opposite is true. They want to see the passengers marching to the gate as soon as possible and with as few detours as feasible so that by boarding time everyone is accounted for. For the airlines, passengers caught up in a shopping or eating frenzy are not sources of additional revenue, they are a source of potential departure delay.
As I am a very bad customer from the airport shops’ perspective, I usually walk right through the supermarket and proceed to the gate area… But which gate? Well, at least in Brussels I discovered a neat secret. While the common monitors do not show gate numbers until about 30 minutes before boarding time, the monitors at the gates themselves show the next flight a good deal earlier! So, I just walk down the centre of the terminal and peer at the monitors. In nine cases out of ten I do not even have to go half way before I spot the right gate. Using this trick I normally end up pretty lonely as few of my fellow passengers will be there already, most of them still waiting for the common monitors to reveal their secret….
The scene is very similar at most airports which boast expansive new shopping facilities. That there is a real problem with stray passengers is amply illustrated by the constant public address announcements in, for example, Amsterdam urging passengers to proceed to the gate as they are delaying their flight and their baggage will be off-loaded momentarily. I have often looked around on hearing this announcement looking for passengers suddenly breaking into a mad rush but could not spot any.
So what is going on? On the one hand, airports want to keep passengers in the shopping area as long as possible since this is the only way to keep their concession holders happy. More time spent around the shops means more money spent… On the other hand the airlines, who are also customers of the airport, must have their flock at the gate in time to ensure an orderly and timely boarding process. Passengers are human and as such, susceptible to the marketing tricks and practices thrown at them and who should blame them? They usually have little feel for the precision machinery at work in the background that would ensure an on time departure if only they had not spent so much time deciding the color of mom’s new pumps without which she felt she could not start her holidays.
Three players, three conflicting interests. What can be done?
First and foremost, I think we can all agree that the practices followed by the airports to “motivate” passengers to spend time in the shopping malls are not necessarily evil unless it is really overdone. The late posting of the gate number is on the verge of that in my view, but OK. Passengers obviously like to shop, so they should not be denied the privilege either. That leaves the airlines and in the current scheme of things, they are the ones who have the least influence on this airport/passenger conspiracy.
But looking at the problem in a bit more detail, it is easy to see that for each passenger there is a clearly definable moment in time when he becomes a potential delay if he or she does not proceed to the gate with all due speed. It is those passengers who are on the wrong side of that point in time that must be identified and gently urged to act without delay. All the rest can be left to their shopping or eating until their time of fame arrives.
One could imagine a range of active and passive tools to do the urging. Passive tools could be dedicated displays placed in the shops and restaurants showing flights whose passengers should be proceeding to the gate… The displays would of course show customized information, depending on where they are located compared to the gates in question.
Active tools can be made even more intelligent. The boarding pass, whether printed at home or issued at the airport, represents a unique link between the person holding it and the flight to which it provides access. What is more, the boarding pass is scanned at least when one pays in a shop and at some places also when one passes security or other designated control posts. It should be easy to set up a system, as part of airport collaborative decision making (CDM), to recognize when a passenger is late compared to where he or she should be in respect of the gate location of the flight concerned. When this happens, a gentle nudge can be generated taking the form of a personalized message on a small dedicated display or just a note to the scanning salesperson or the agent concerned who could then verbally advise the passenger to hurry a bit… Passengers who had given their cell phone numbers could also be sent text messages when the system notices that they are still too far from the gate. This kind of arrangement would probably not raise any privacy issues either as the scanning of the boarding pass is already common practice. Introducing scanning in the restaurants would be a small incremental change and the investment needed would also be limited.
Are missing passengers a big enough problem to warrant all this fuss? It would appear that the issue is substantial enough to be worth looking into. And the fuss is not that big… Most of what is needed is already there and being done. The change would be in how the information generated is actually used. The system described is not all encompassing and would not catch all stray passengers but would certainly find enough of them to make a real difference. An excellent example of expanding CDM into new territories.
Hello Steve,
The search for a solution through the TITAN project seems a good direction.
Congratulations for this developpement! The three partners involved in the airport customer relations (airport authority, airlines and passengers) have interests to ally with a view to optimizing the service.
Different solutions seem already technologically possible. But everything has a cost.
Why not insert a RFID chip in the passenger’s boarding pass, crisscross the airport terminal identification chips, inform passengers using their mobile phone messaging automatically triggered by the airport database, that the path of the passenger to his gate starts to become problematic (<15 prior to boarding): these are developments that are currently available, able to address the concerns of "just in time", while optimizing business airport, without endangering aircraft rotations. A business case seems however recommended before launching such an operation.
Hi,
Not so long ago we did a study for EUROCONTROL that explored the possibilities of what was called Level 4 CDM. One of the conclusions was that any new CDM activity will need to look at the land-side processes and the pax’s progress thriugh the terminal (and possibly even before it) if substantial improvements are to be made. As you correctly point out, a lot of technology is available now to make sure pax are notified when they are in the verge of becoming “critical”. Traditional boarding passes would have been ideal as carriers of RFID but with the home printed passes things become a bit more complicated. One possibility could be to have a single “branding station” where all passes would get the RFID and from there on the passengers would not need to do anything extra themselves. I am not sure whether this “post production” RFID is available, but if not, it is probably not rocket science to make it.
I don’t doubt that some very clever technical solutions can be devised to reduce the missing pax problem, but I doubt very much that they will ever be clever enough to deal with the 000s of dumb ways passengers can screw up in the Terminal. It alsways amazed me that any of them foudn their way through some Airports. At London Heathrow, all the signs are in English, but the passengers clearly aren’t. And how many of those in transit actually have the correct local time on their watches?
The partial answer is to go back to the ‘Good Old Days’ when men were men, and passengers who didn’t make it in time were left behind. Of course we can’t do that now because of… you’ve guessed it.. SECURITY, the single biggest destroyer of punctuality ever devised. The threat of unaccompanied luggage is obvious, so any no show (and it only takes one out of say 550 on an A380 to ruin it for the other 549) means no one moves until the bag is located and removed. It doesn’t make it any more acceptable that the system gives every impression of being run and devised by morons, but we just have to live with it. One solution is just to ensure that the bags only get loaded as the passenger is checked at the gate. The obvious objection is that it doesn’t leave much time to complete bag and freight loading, but not all passengers arrive at the last moment, so it might not be as bad as it seems. I can’t believe it is impossible to devise a loading system that meets those criteria if one really tried as if it mattered (which it does). Many airlines insist anyway that you arrive at the gate 30 mins before departure so they are most of the way there already. I just wish they didn’t apply this blanket rule to those travelling without hold bags. Of course once passengers realise that they can no longer hold the aircraft and all it occupants to ransom by turning up when they feel like it, the incidence of such antisocial behaviour should fall off a cliff. Sounds good, why don’t we do it?
The no bag without passenger rule is based on the (old) assumption that the bad guys are averse to being blown to kingdom come and hence if the owners of all the bags are on board, it is not likely that one of them is a bad guy. But we know now that for many being blown up is an honour so the basis of the old rule has become somewhat shaky at best.
With 100 % of hold baggage being subject to screening, is it still reasonable is it still reasonable to insist on unloading the bags of stray pax?
100 % screening and the mindset of suicide bombers together probably make the rule obsolte.
Indeed, your proposal possibly combined with a relaxation of the old rule could solve the problem at very little or no extra cost.
Steve, you are quite right, we now have several overlapping defences against explosive devices on board and the old assumptions that the bad guys don’t like suicide are patently wrong. But I know the security people will never allows us to let up on the most obvious threat for fear it will just raise its head again, and I think for once they might be right.
I can agree with you that more emphasis should be put on the 100% screening, since the detection equipment can also provide 100% reliability for any material or dangerous object, which is not yet the case, except by using several different cumulative techniques very expensive.
Everything can always be technically solved, but at what cost? It involves setting up a model of acceptable risk, taking account of acceptable performance by passengers, airlines and airports.
Hi,
When on-line pax arrive at the gate & their hand luggage is over weight this delays not only the departure but may delay any arriving aircraft that needs to park in that space. What’s the answer to over weight baggage at the gate & how can this be implemented?
The case of overweight hand-luggage is in part a result of airlines charging extra for checked luggage… But of course very often business people on day trips might also end up carrying more than their allowance. This is becoming an issue especially with business people also tending toi travel in coach class to save on the travel budget. To the best of my knowledge the weight of the hand luggage is a real issue only on some smaller aircraft types (and might be an issue on flights which are otherwise weight limited) and in most cases the weight comes into play only as a source of additional revenue.
In my experience, not many airlines bother to weigh the hand luggage at the gate… Some do of course but the aggrevation and potential delays probably negate any advantages that might come from the additional revenue (where this is a possibility at all).
What could be the solution? Well, an interesting analogy is found at, for instance, Washington Dulles airport where the hand luggage screening equipment has a cut-out on the enrance side and only hand-luggage that passes through the cut out is allowed on board. if your bag is bigger, you are not allowed through.
Obviously, the security check is not necessarily the place to select bad size and weight but if we look at this in a process oriented way an from the viewpoint of the passenger, someone who has checked in on line either at home or at a self-service kiosk, will come into contact with the airport and the airline at the security check-point. So there is no reason why such an encounter should not be multi-purpose and do both security and size and weight checking.
There would be a need for some extra hardware (a balance built inot the checking apparatus) and the officers there would need some extra training… The system would also need to have some intelligence as allowed bag weight depends on travel class and airlines, but these are details that can be solved easily in to-day’s computer driven world.
The main thing is that the already slow pace of security checking should not become even longer on account of the hand-luggage size and weight control.
Of course there are other solutions possible…