If I’m checking a bag, I rarely bother checking in online in advance. It just doesn’t save any time. Airline processes are just too cumbersome.
There are some airlines in the world that have a ‘just drop the bag and go’ process, but most do not. It really shouldn’t be that hard.
American Airlines has finally made a simple improvement to their bag check process that’s actually a nice time-saver.
When you check in online, and opt during that check-in process to check bags, customers can walk up to a kiosk and go right to ‘print bag tags’ rather than walking through a repeat of all of the steps.
The customer begins at a full-service kiosk by either scanning the boarding pass, inputting the AAdvantage number or ticket number. If they have added bags online and already checked-in, there will be an intercept screen with 2 options.1. Print bag tags – When selected, this will directly go to the printing screen and print all the bag tags within that PNR and go to the thank you screen, and the session will end.
2. Need something else – When selected, this will take the customer through the standard kiosk flow, starting with the Hazmat screen, allowing them to do additional tasks.
This doesn’t just save each customer time at the kiosk. I’m a big advocate of saving time. It’s why I don’t like checking bags – not just because I far prefer being in control over my own destiny rather than at the mercy of lost luggage – I don’t want to spend half an hour or more at baggage claim on each end of a trip, multiplied out over scores of trips each year, year after year.
I don’t want to look back on my life and think, “I wasted half a year of my life at baggage claim.”
I also don’t want to spend more time than necessary standing at an airline kiosk. But this does something more than that. You spend less time queueing for a kiosk when each customer spends less time at the kiosk. So while this seems like a small improvements, the world is made up of continued improvement at the margin.
The earlier innovation was express bag tag kiosks so that customers who have pre-paid bags to print bag tags right away. But now standard ‘full service’ kiosks (he said, unironically) contain this same functionality.
