If Air Canada has its way, it soon will see fewer travellers lined up at the airport, clutching printouts of their boarding passes, in addition to suitcases and carry-on luggage. Air Canada is using DIY method to shorten airport lineups; BlackBerry platform also being developed.
The country's largest airline yesterday introduced an application for the Apple Inc. iPhone and iPod Touch devices that lets travellers retrieve electronic boarding passes, track flight data and receive notifications about delayed and cancelled flights.
An application designed for BlackBerry devices is also in the works, said Patrice Ouellette, director of customer service platforms.
Ouellette said web check-in is increasingly popular but only a fraction of passengers check in with mobile devices to have an electronic boarding pass emailed to them.
The problem now is those emailed barcodes can get lost in a mountain of other correspondence; the iPhone and iPod application, by contrast, consolidates all of Air Canada's flight data in one place.
Also, the airline is expanding programs that allow passengers to print baggage tags from airport kiosks. Research suggests that could shave 15 to 30 minutes off the time air passengers spend in lineups.
"To be honest, I wasn't sure if it would be picked up or not by the customer," Ouellette said of self-tagging. But the practice is catching on – about 90,000 people tagged their own bags last week – a number he expects will rise once the service expands from Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver to major airports across the country.
Such do-it-yourself approaches promise eventually to reduce relatively high costs for the money-losing airline, but for now, Ouellette said the focus is on increasing customer convenience.
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