Northwest, American offering self-service check-ins at airport

To expedite travel service, Northwest Airlines has joined American Airlines in installing two TouchPort self-service devices for passenger use at the Springfield-Branson Regional Airport.

The TouchPort self-service devices are compact, standing computers linking flyers to personal flight data. Users gain access with a credit card or frequent flyer card. The service is available only to passengers who have purchased electronic tickets, said Phil Reed, vice president of marketing for Northwest Airlink.

After deploying self-service devices at major airports Northwest serves, the carrier is now in the process of placing them at its smaller Airlink stations. Springfield is one of 20 airports to receive a self-service device. The machines are going in at a rate of up to 15 per week, said Kurt Ebenhoch, spokesman for Northwest Airlines.

Advantages

Passengers can check in for flights, obtain boarding passes, select or change seat assignments based on a schematic view of the plane's interior, change flights, scan their itinerary for upcoming flight information and check luggage, Reed said.

It reduces check-in time to about five minutes, said Bob Hartley, local customer service manager for American Airlines. The carrier has more than 400 self-service devices in place at more than 50 airports nationwide.

Expensive assistance

The devices don't come cheap, but actual costs for equipment such as this are rarely disclosed by air carriers due to the negotiated discounts they receive for volume business, Ebenhoch said. The carrier plans to have self-service devices in 144 airports it serves by the end of 2002, he added.

Excluding expensive proprietary software and engineering costs, the machines can run up to $20,000 each, said Jim Brown, corporate communications spokesman at Kinetics Inc., the manufacturer of Northwest's TouchPort check-in kiosks.

Kinetics Inc., a privately held, 14-year-old firm operating in Lake Mary, Fla., employs 50 people. It has built 677 self-service devices for Northwest, as well as the 700 machines Continental uses and the 500 that Delta deploys, Brown said.

IBM makes the self-service devices for United and U.S. Airways, Brown said. Neither U.S. Airways nor United has a machine at the Springfield airport.

Chris Nardella, spokesperson for United, said the carrier has 324 self-service devices in operation at 10 airports, but Springfield is not being considered for one.

Frequency of use

"We're checking in about 1 million passengers a month electronically," Ebenhoch said. Of these, about 800,000 are using the self-service devices and the rest are checking in online at www.nwa.com.

About 15,000 passengers a day use United's machines, Nardella said.

More than 5 million passengers have used American's self-service devices since 2000, said Emilio Howell, spokesman for American.

Security measures

While using a self-service device allows the passenger to skip the waiting line, all other security measures remain in place, Reed said. "All this does is give you a boarding pass; it doesn't allow any circumvention."

In the future, Kinetics' machines may employ special biometrics devices for identification of "known" or "registered" travelers, Brown said.

While iris identification and facial configuration methods have been considered, it will probably be a fingerprint reader, he added.