Ideas and innovation!

I came across this today, I know it was in pipeline I had read a lot about this kind of project and there are couple of more companies doing this too. I will have a look and try to compile a list.

http://www.bagdrop.com/

But this is gives me to think about a fully automatic terminal. With no of staff at check-in or bag drop and boarding!!

Will keep you posted for where I can reach.

Is this Research????

Hi everyone!!

I came across this article in news. It is very interesting in only one term, does this actually needs any research to reach this conclusion?? and even more do you actually need to publish this as science and technology news????

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/scienceandtechnology/science/sciencenews/5836445/Using-the-airport-moving-walkways-actually-slows-you-down.html

That is so simple to notice at airport. The only reason people use moving walkway is because they don't want to walk. There are loads of passengers who just walk to the desired destination, bcas they know that moving walkway is slower!!! Common Sense!!!

I have always questioned the utility of moving walkways and having used it the only logic to have it at airport is for convenience not speed. The standards say that if the passengers need to walk for more than 300-400 odd meters which is very normal for a medium to big airport, they need to be assisted so that is how the architects assist passenger- moving walkways!!!

I think the person who did the above research should have spent his time on what are the other ways possible and as convenient and less infrastructure hungry for the purpose quoted above!!

New Product I came across this week

Hi all,

I was browsing through various profiles and discussion on LinkedIN and came across this one very interesting product which I was not aware. It is basically dependent on the the bluetooth of your mobile phone. Once the system is installed on your airport which basically is a bluetooth gateway. This than keeps track of the length of queue and dwell time of passengers at key points in airport. Interesting isn't it??

That means if I have this at my airport it is like a real life simulation were you can get results similar to the various simulation models, that is very interesting because if the passenger queuing and dwell times could than be linked to the passenger profiles and you can get a perfect data for the simulation model and you can use it for design and development on other airports. The only thing is does this thing require passenger acknowledgement or is passenger aware that he/she is being tracked. Is it not intruding privacy?? Just wondering.

I than searched for similar products on Google and wow there are many others that provide similar capability!! This sounds cool tool for airport planners like us, atleast very important to create more data and more statisitics!! It is lot of fun!!!

The link to the site is http://www.blipsystems.com/. Have a look and let me know your thought as well!!

Cheers!!

Some ideas already being Implemented

Hi all,

I come across this news article for Ryan Air one of the low cost airlines in Europe. The ideas that I put forward in the last posts regarding carrying the luggage to the cargo hold area and charging passengers to use the toilets are going to be implemented as mentioned in the news. You can have a look for yourself. I was not able to believe this.

http://online.wsj.com/article/BT-CO-20090623-705039.html

I did not knew that Ryan Air was seriously thinking of this while I posted my ideas. Is it a coincidence or I am as smart as Mr. Micheal O'Leary.

See you soon!!
Bye

New Ideas for Cutting costs for Low Cost Airlines

In current economic scenario, it is important to cut the costs and generate new revenues to sustain the business and stay in profit. Recently, I have been reading about the steps taken by the low cost airlines to charge the passenger for each and every service. It is very interesting to speculate what will be the further steps to increase the profitability of such airlines.

Further ideas in reducing costs for Low cost airlines

1. Charge for using the toilet onboard the flight, that will keep the toilet clean and added stream of revenue.

2. Start booking passengers on the crew seats, as the flight needs less Crew Members per passenger than regular airlines.

3. Put the aircraft on auto pilot, after take-off and advise the Pilot to take pay cut, or pay only if manual intervention is required during the flight.

4. Keep the use of terminal to minimal, on both ends,
a. Ask the passenger to carry bags to aircraft and help them load the hold luggage if he wants to carry it.
b. distribute the hold luggage to disembarking passengers on the apron instead of paying to the baggage handler to carry the bags to terminal.

5. Replace all the check-in desks by self service check-in kiosks probably shared, charge passenger for any assistance provided by the roving agents.(like we pay for the calls to solve technical problems).

I am also thinking about new ways to generate revenue at the airport and also new system designs to improve the efficiency, seriously. Not for fun. I have put on my thinking cap and will surely post something new for you all to think and comment!!!

RFID + Toilet at Airports= Revenue

RFID is a new technology and people keep on talking about the benefits it can bring to the airport operations both in efficiency and revenue generation. I was just wondering how much we can stretch the use of this technology. This idea is inspired from reading Bogus Talk too seriously in Passenger Terminal World.

It is now common to visualize RFID activated boarding passes for better reconciliation of passenger and also to keep track of passenger activities inside the terminal. I have been thinking about what will be the outcome of such technology, will it be considered as intrusion to private space as the operator will know where the passenger is and what he bought or what he didn’t.

I have noticed that airports don’t miss a single blank wall for generating revenue (advertisement). But there is one space which is not yet captivated!! “Back of the toilet door”. I am yet to encounter a toilet door pasted with some kind of add campaign and that brought me to this interesting idea of putting advert on the back of the toilet cubicle door, and that will be more interesting if it was 100% relevant to the person sitting on the toilet seat!!

Okay now I know this is what the advertising is visualized as…100% personalized (like the text adds on the side bar) but toilet seat is like having one to one conversation. RFID enabled boarding pass can be very helpful in this. The person swipes his boarding pass to enter the cubicle, and thus it has the information who is seating on the toilet seat. There could be an LCD screen wired to an add server. As soon as the door is locked, the LCD screen comes to life. It will show the ads totally relevant to that person as I am assuming that personal database can be linked to the boarding card if it is RFID enabled. Bingo!!!! You can charm the passenger or irritate him. If he wants to avoid it he can switch of the screen!!! That would make one inane and compulsory act of going to toilet more refreshing and revenue generating!!! The LCD ads will have soothing music that the passenger can listen too…and the screen switches off as soon as the Cubicle is unlocked!! The only downside might be that we might get too many late passengers and might have to look for the missing passenger in toilets!! But wait…… you can flash the time for Flight as you know who is in front of the Screen!!! That will be extra revenue for the airport and some entertainment for the passenger!!!

Airport Self Service Check-in Simulations

Simulation models are becoming essential for the estimating the requirements for Airports. I was interested in finding out how it works and decided to develop one for my self. The only problem was what tool should I use for the same. After looking for various possiblilities like MATLAB or Witness, I decided the one most widely available and easily understood by all; Excel. Now the only issue was how valid it will be to use it for the simulation of complex process of Airport Check-in. I have simulated only the Check-in process with Check-in Desks, Kiosks and Web Check-in. The results were interesting and I thought it will be very nice to share with some of you, thus decided to write a blog on the same. This was part of my MSc Thesis at Cranfield University and I am awaiting results.I have used Excel 2007 to make the model and thus the files does not have backward compatibility. I am sharing the user guide and kind of things that can be achieved by the model. I can forward the file with anyone who wants to know more about it. Leave a comment or two and I will get back to you very soon.

The Simulation model is designed in MS Office Excel 2007.The simulation model simulates the check-in process at airport with self-service and web check-in.It is designed to estimate the requirements for a two step self service check-in, which includes kiosks and bag drop-off at the airport.The model enables the users to analyze the impacts of the changes made in resources and estimate the requirements of check-in counters, kiosks and bag drop-off.The structure of the model, the inputs required and interpretation of results have been explained to enable the user to get the maximum utility from the model.

The model has been kept as simple as possible and there is no additional software or macros required to run the simulation.The model is limited to the size of the inputs. The model can only compute for maximum 2500 Peak hour passengers or maximum resources of 25 in each mode.

The model can determine the average queuing time for passengers, determine the resources required to process the total passengers with various combination of resources possible. The simulation model can also determine the Fast Bag drop off which is big unknown for the airports right now.

The model was developed after collecting data from three airports. It was noticed that the queuing at airport was determined by the arrival profiles at the airport. Thus the model was designed so that the airport can modify the arrival profile to suit the local situations. It was observed that there are in particular three types of arrival profiles as leisure, business and mixed.

During the development of model various options were evaluated and other variables like processing times and arrival in groups were also tested. It was observed that other variables did not affect the queuing at the check-in desk to a great extent, thus those were not included as variables that a user can modify easily. The model still addresses the variability in processing times and number of bags per person.

The results were interesting and various scenarios were tested to check the sensitivity of the model. The model was able to replicate the as is scenarios and also was able to provide the logical answers to the porblem of exact resources. The conclusion was that self-service check-in can be very useful to the airports with more business travellers or passengers with less bags. It was noticed that the limiting factor was the fast bag drop-off and not the CUSS Check-ins.

I would be glad to share more information and knowledge with anyone and discuss more about the details if you are interested. Thanks for reading and I will appreciate your inputs!!!