E-Travel: The Future Takes Flight
- by Paul Kallender -
|
The travel industry as we know it is about to change gears, and the Internet is in the driver's seat. Dubbed
e-travel, this new paradigm offers many advantages to travelers, the most appealing of which is shorter queues
at check-in - but other, more futuristic benefits,
are just around the corner.
It will start with an internet booking. it may well finish with popping a smart card into a hotel kiosk. The whole process of getting from A to B for business or pleasure is about to be transformed by e-business technology. So says David Dingley, IBM's worldwide strategist for the travel and transportation industry, who forecasts that Web applications, self-service kiosks, and smart cards will ease the stress and avoid the queues we normally associate with any journey, particularly by air. "A recent survey by American Express found that in an average journey, a passenger typically spends an hour waiting in queues for check-in, immigration, customs, and baggage collection," says Dingley. "The technologies to cut this wasted time are right now available at various levels of sophistication." It's an attractive vision. Imagine that yesterday you booked your flight from an airline's website and reserved your hotel room via a new smart card issued by your bank. But today you are stuck in traffic in sight of the airport, 30 minutes before take off. A computer chip in your smart phone alerts the airline automatically and prioritizes your reservation. Even better, it beeps you in the taxi telling you that the flight is in fact delayed an hour. At the gate, a self-service kiosk will process your smart card (which carries all your reservation details), completes your check-in procedures in seconds, and bump you up to first class according to your automatically updated frequent flyer bonus entitlement. At your destination, you speed through immigration by inserting your machine-readable passport into an immigration kiosk and placing your palm on a scanner. The kiosk checks the machine readings from your hand with those in a database, confirms your identity, and automatically endorses your visa. When you finally reach the hotel, that handy card delivers you another sub-one minute check-in and doubles as your room key. A journey like this is now possible, says Dingley, although he concedes that while many of the technologies exist, getting them to work together is as yet beyond the power of any one player in any of the associated industries. However, airlines, travel agencies, and hotels are looking seriously towards many of the processes outlined above, and implementation over the next decade is a matter of when, rather than if. From just a few hundred two years ago, the number of travel agent and hotel sites on the Internet is now exploding. According to PhoCusWright (an independent strategy and research company specializing in the online Internet travel marketplace), Yahoo.com's top-ranked Travelocity site received some 260 million individual visitors in 1997. Second-placed AOL.com's Preview Travel site received 21 million, and third-ranking Microsoft's Expedia.com got 18.5 million. But when was the last time you booked a flight over the Web? Despite growing travel site traffic, only 1% of the world's most wired nation parted with money to make Web-based travel bookings in 1997. And what about those parts of the world with relatively low PC penetration, such as Japan? Travel service providers are trying hard to attract more users by getting their online sites beyond being simple advertising and booking media, a process that's being helped by Java applications that enable faster delivery of maps, video, and audio to help sell travel products. Air Canada, for example, first posted a website in 1995 as an image and communications vehicle. In 1997, it began using the Internet to broadcast last minute seat sales, and last Fall launched its Cyber Ticket Office with full interactive booking capability and virtual tours of its planes' interiors. Visitors can check schedules, make bookings, change flight and seat reservations, and pay online by credit card. Beyond that, they can check flight status and frequent flyer balances. Cargo customers can also track their shipments in real-time. The site receives nearly 8 million visitors a week, according to Ron LeRadza, general manager for product distribution at Air Canada. "The important thing is choice. You can still call or visit the travel agent, but if it's four in the morning and your flight leaves in five hours, you can come onto the Net and do business with us," he says. Travel agents are also starting to take full advantage of the new technology. "There have been frequent predictions of the death of the travel agent because of direct sales over the Internet. But that is simply not going to happen," says Dingley. "The Internet is a valuable tool that travel agencies are learning to utilize. Travel agent revenues in the USA, for example, rose 25% last year." But will this work in environments like Japan? Currently in Japan, Internet booking levels are low. Japan Airlines (JAL) estimates that Internet transactions represented 2-3% of bookings made to the airline in 1997, with Japan Air Systems (JAS) and All Nippon Airways (ANA) toting similar figures. According to Kotaro Matsumoto, a specialist for the Travel and Transportation Industry at IBM Japan, phone credit card reservations are popular in Japan, but more than 50% of all bookings are still made by physical trips to travel agents, and group travel reservations are entirely done face-to-face with agents. "The Internet user community is still a minority here, especially for home use," says Matsumoto. "People will toy with visiting a travel agent site on the Web during office hours, but the trip to the travel agent is still seen as a traditional virtue." Realizing the potential of matching Japanese familiarity with automation with the national obsession with convenience, the Japan Travel Bureau (JTB) has worked with IBM to wire some 11,500 of Japan's 35,000 convenience stores with online kiosks. The goal is to take some of the legwork out of booking domestic and international travel services, as well as domestic hotel and airline reservations. "It's been a big hit for two reasons," says Matsumoto. "First, customers can make the bookings while they are shopping for lunch, and second, the kiosks are open until 2AM. Online convenience store kiosks could provide the most readily available access to e-travel and e-commerce services for Japanese consumers." According to Dingley, intelligent smart cards are what will really drive the development of e-travel among airlines and hotels. First, smart cards could be the technology that answers the "Is it safe?" question from consumers concerned with online commerce. They can be equipped to work with the Secure Electronic Transaction (SETs) protocols developed by Visa, MasterCard and Amex, and thus offer greatly enhanced security over traditional magnetic stripe credit cards. "The banks we have talked with are encouraging the introduction of smart cards, because they like the security of the encrypted codes," says Dingley. "The main technical constraint will be the normal 2-3 year cycle over which credit cards are regularly reissued." The computer chip of a smart card also makes data portable, and that offers the travel industry the prospect of equipping travelers with a single handy card, smart enough to carry reservation and payment data, and capable of quickly handling transactions at potential bottlenecks such as check-in. Selected corporate travelers are already being offered such a card in a trial from Hilton Hotels, who teamed up with American Express and IBM to hand out 5,000 chip-enabled cards to frequent travelers for use at check-in. "We did a survey of 250 travelers, of whom 98% said they found the system easy to use," says John Luke, Vice President of the hotel chain's front office systems. Luke says 97% of customers said they would have no qualms using the kiosks again, and 91% preferred the system to more traditional check-in procedures. Hilton guests will soon be able to use the card for services throughout the hotel, including the card becoming their room key. Overall, this development will dovetail into the Hilton chain's larger IT plans for a virtual Web-based reservation desk, linking 100,000 rooms at some 400 hotels worldwide through a global database. Self-service kiosks capable of handling smart card bookings are also being introduced gradually by airlines around the world. British Airways (BA) travelers from London's Heathrow Terminal 1 can now use self-service check-in kiosks for boarding flights within Europe if they are carrying only hand luggage. Working like super ATM's, self-service kiosks use touch screen graphics to guide even the least technically minded passenger. BA passengers to Europe can confirm their reservations, change their seat allocations, and receive a printed receipt. BA intends to roll out the kiosks across the UK, European hubs, and JFK in New York City. "All they need is the credit card they used to make the booking, or their BA Executive Club Card," says Adam Daniels, manager for self-service projects at BA. "We found that passengers like the kiosks because they were quick and helped avoid queues at check-in - and they loved the fact that they could change their seat allocations." Kiosks make sense for airlines Passenger volumes at Heathrow, for example, already 9 million a year, are expected to grow by 5-7% annually. "With airlines and airports facing pressure on existing facilities, kiosk technology will offer the means to cut congestion and use space more efficiently, especially at peak times," says Dingley. The kiosks will also enable airlines to cut costs. "Electronic tickets can be issued at a fraction of the cost of paper tickets, and will cut a large percentage of the distribution costs faced by the travel industry" says Dingley. "In future, tickets are more likely to exist as entries on an airlineÕs reservation computer than as physical pieces of paper carried by a passenger." Beyond that, says Dingley, the support systems around the kiosks will eventually make the terminals themselves redundant. "Eventually you may not even need to go near one. Just walking across the airport concourse will be sufficient for a signal from some smart device - your cellphone or PDA - to signal your arrival," he says. Similar self-service kiosks are also in operation at Tokyo's Haneda airport for domestic flights on JAL, ANA, and JAS. As Japan's pampered travelers expect fast processing, Matsumoto predicts that the kiosk smart card combination could be a big hit. "We have already moved to computerized kiosks and we are talking to several major Japanese banks who have shown interest in smart cards. Japanese expect to check-in quickly and anything seen as more efficient will be appreciated," he says. Looking further in the future, Dingley envisions customs and immigration checks through biometrics technologies and kiosks for machine-readable passports. IBM in Toronto is now developing an automated passenger clearing system for this purpose called Fastgate, which can check a passenger's physical characteristics such as palm measurements or fingerprints. "Frequent flyers to a particular destination can have their biometrics registered with a country's immigration authorities," explains Dingley. "You will simply place your palm on a sensor that will confirm your identity and verify the details against immigration records and your passport." But Dingley admits that it will be sometime before any one country or airline offers a fully integrated travel service involving all the IT solutions mentioned here. "To implement all of these solutions is going to require a significant level of integration and cooperation between travel service providers and governments," he says. "Setting cross-industry and cross-border standards, particularly for politically sensitive functions like immigration checks, will take time." However, as more travel bookings are carried online and banks begin to replace magnetic stripe credit cards with all- purpose smart cards, the introduction of e-travel technology is going to gain momentum, even in Japan. "Banks are already interested in smart cards and passengers are getting used to automated services," says Matsumoto. "It is only a matter of time before consumers make the link between technology and superior security, and service. It's no longer a question of if this technology can make travel more carefree and comfortable, just when." Paul Kallender is Tokyo correspondent for Space News. He routinely returns to Earth to cover terrestrial travel of the future. Catch him before he next lifts off at pkk@tkb.att.ne.jp. |
