Amsterdam Airport Launches API Platform
developer.schiphol.nl
developer.schiphol.nl
Airports/flight/airlines are PRIME candidates for Progressive Web Apps.
https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/kayak-flights-hotels-cars/id...
Then there's all sorts of second tier airports which have their own apps of sorts - say, even Dyce (Aberdeen) has one, though I am not sure it is an official product.
Add to that that any airline worth its salt has got at least one app, and it soon adds up...
To this day, I print my boarding passes at home and just go. I have never used an app of any kind to assist in air travel nationally or internationally. Never missed a flight or had any issues transacting changes or any of the commonly encountered issues while travelling.
And I do have an iPhone in my pocket at all times.
Same with taking a bus, train, subway, checking into a hotel, etc.
I'm curious. What has changed that someone might need a couple dozen different apps?
How many of these are solutions chasing problems? Or "just 'cause we can"?
Google does a fairly good job at aggregating the info so you can search for flight status, but you have to actively poll for it.
For that reason, many people have lots of individual airline apps, or lots of individual sign ups for notices.
Similar for keeping your air, car, and hotel reservation details somewhat "together".
As speed, the sms came ca 1sec after the change has been displayed at the original gate.
There are a lot more people flying and/or flying more and that could increase the complexity of travel. Also, increased security can lead to more variable wait time and thus another variable to consider more now when deciding on what time to leave for a flight. Perhaps the increase in flight apps allows more efficient travel planning and thus saves people a lot of time? Just a thought.
Not saying it isn't real. It just puzzles me that people might need a dozen apps when I just print a couple of pieces of paper (or refer to my email itinerary notices) and all is well.
Just to clarify, I am not being critical of anyone at all. I'm just puzzled, that's all.
... doing your taxes is as simple as filling out a form - why would you ever need an online system if I can just grab the form from the newsagent and fill it out? I've personally never had any problems
... we used to get just fine between locations using boats, why did anyone bother to invent planes? I personally have plenty of time to sit on a boat
The difference between travelling with and without apps is nowhere near the differences in the scenarios you are painting.
Airline travel was designed pre-app era. Which means that, by definition, nobody needs smartphones with apps to travel. Airports are probably the most efficient buildings in the world.
That being said, as a developer I don't see any reason to be anything other than excited about this. I think you've been pretty lucky to have never run into an issue while traveling. I've had my fair share of run-ins with last minute gate changes, too-tight layovers, incorrect signage at overcrowded airports, etc. If I could build my own little Twilio integration that alerted me the second a gate change occurred, that'd be awesome (and super fun to build).
Then again, we're living in the golden age of integrations right now and I get overly excited about all of this shit : )
Dates, times, addresses, phone numbers, frequent flyer info, confirmation numbers, hotel, rental car, and other contact info.
I also do all the math to understand at what time I should leave home or the hotel to be at the airport on time.
If I have to rent a car I'll map the route from airport to hotel and print a Google map with directions.
I do the same for any meeting, visit or location during my stay wherever I am going.
I'll usually send that document to my wife if travelling alone or, if it is a family trip I'll send it to a family member so they have all our trip info handy (you never know).
I'll print one copy for each person travelling. That goes in your bag, wallet, pocket, whatever.
And that's it. As I said in a prior comment, I have yet to be at the airport and thought "I should find an app for my iPhone". Our travelling is usually very relaxed because all the information we need is in one place.
And it does not require power. Maybe that's the key. As a long time sailor I learn the hard way that anything electronic can and will fail exactly when you need it. It can also be stolen or damaged. I don't want to find myself in a situation where all of my information lives behind a small screen that I just lost or can't power-up. Paper still works wonders...you can even write notes on it.
Well, when the world isn't perfect, an app that readily answers questions such as "how long is the plane going to be delayed for?" or "when will they send us the baby carriage? We are tired of holding him." or "does that guy have a license for that submachine gun he's holding?" is appreciated.
And you can get those answers without getting up from your coffee table or calling the authorities.
However, things happen. The good airport apps can tell you stuff like "You just got out at Arrivals C/2. Next flight departs from B42, to your right, four minutes. Estimated delay 25 minutes, but boarding still closes in 11 minutes.
Granted, you can get the same info from signage and info screens, but when you've been on your way for a day, tired out of your mind, your incoming flight was delayed and you may not catch the last leg home, having to spend (yet another) night in a hotel with as much character as a helping of yesterday's mashed potatoes, getting the information you need on a small screen in front of you rather than having to go looking is gold. Pure, brilliant gold.
And I really should only need one, which is where this API comes in - if other airports could fall in line and agree on a common API, maybe we could get an app or two which aggregates data from the airports on your journey and presents it in a tidy way.
Here's my reality when I fly with my small children. I make it a game. I give them the printouts and have them navigate the family around the airport, etc. Airports are designed very well. They are designed for someone who doesn't speak the local language to find their way around.
And so, the way I look at it is: If a couple of kids, 9 and 10 years old, don't have a problem then I think for the most part these are solutions looking for problems. A piece of paper does just fine for probably 99% of travel scenarios.
Had the comment poster said something like "There's this one app that helps me get around and this is how it works" I think I would have reacted positively to that statement. The exact quote was:
"If this (eventually) leads to the possibility of one -1- properly designed and implemented airport app rather than me having a couple dozen different apps installed, all buggy and crash prone and with hardly any common UI features at all - then I'm all for it..."
Which triggered the question: Why does someone have to go through all of this pain and aggravation when millions of people have been travelling around the world for decades with nothing more than a few pieces of paper?
Most of what I read about this is unnecessary. Airports were designed way before smartphones every existed. Ergo, they work very well without them. In fact, they work very well with nothing more than a few pieces of paper in your hand.
My comment was more in exasperation that when airport apps first are a thing - why, oh why does every airport need its own proprietary one?
And why are they more often than not made with hardly a thought being spared as to UX - and all seemingly designed by some new media company who just hankered a bloke in from the street which had the good marketing sense and poor judgment to put 'app development' on his resume after successfully completing the 'Hello, World!' tutorial in Android Studio...
I can understand that. It sure sounds like transportation in general might benefit from some sort of a unified API world-over. This would make every airline/airport share the same kinds of information in the same ways.
I agree with your sentiment that one app should be all you need.
Extending this to other forms of transportation would be great. Just not sure how something like that would be accomplished.
That said, they (airports, etc.) could not rely on apps to communicate with passengers because you can't assume everyone will have access to them.
I've used printed boarding passes sometimes and other times used the app. Using the app isn't necessarily more convenient when it comes to the boarding pass, but the Delta app can quickly tell me if my flight is delayed, gives me gate updates, and alerts me when my baggage has been loaded onto the plane. Could I get along without it? Sure. But is having that information on my phone useful? Of course.
I've considered owning a printer but my access to printers at work/school has always made them seem like more bother than they're worth. Particularly since other than boarding passes the only use I have for printing documents is work/school.
Once you have kids printers are almost required. Mine are constantly printing homework assignments, coloring pages, etc.
+ It tells me when my stop is coming up and I have to press the button to get out of the bus.
+ It reminds me to checkout.
+ It tells me where to find the bus when I arrive at a train station I don't know.
+ It helps me plan my travel so I can leave on time.
+ It helps me to know when the latest train goes home.
+ It helps me to find the shortest route.
+ It tells me if there are still public bikes available at the station of my destination.
Of course, flying is quite different. Nevertheless I regretfully "did have issues" with flying.
+ I have to buy and print ESTA forms every two years.
+ I have to print boarding passes.
+ I have to print how to go to my hotel after arriving at an airport.
+ I have to look at dumb displays to find my gate.
+ I have to have this paper document called a passport that can be lost and gets you on Interpol if you're unlucky, but that's another story.
+ I almost never get a vegetarian meal because these booking agents are terrible.
+ Try to do the paperwork if you travel with something fancy, e.g. robots. "That doesn't look like a laptop, Sir!"
+ Even making a picture of a carry-on to check if it's the right size might be helpful, because that's the current attack on the passenger.
+ If you travel so often, can you take a bottle of coke with you? No, you're a terrorist.
There are many issues with air travel.
I understand having information conveniently available at your fingertips. That's great. My confusion had more to do with someone saying they need over a dozen apps to be able to travel. Sorry, travelling --by any medium-- predates apps and, for the most part, you don't need much more than a few pieces of paper.
I would not dare get on a flight while fully depending on data inside a phone. If anything happens to that phone you are screwed.
Sarcasm aside. The real answer is: Convenience. There are apps that make my life a lot more convenient. Dutch citizens live on public transport; I have never touched a car in my life. A bus stops at my station every 50 seconds. It is great to be able to quickly plan, get information about delays, allow yourself to take a nap and get woken up by a buzzer etc... It's just convenience. Yes you'll get along fine if you do your daily commute with same train, same bus, same boat. But as soon as you need to do something more exotic, it's nice for an app to have your back
I'm Dutch by the way, and I only ever use the 9292 service to check my itinerary and look for alternative routes if a delay or service cancellation occurs (although usually these are announced and/or provided for).
It's great that I am able to open up a web browser or some app before or during a trip to figure out if my itinerary needs changing or if a connection can be made, but I can't imagine having to depend on a dozen apps to figure out something as basic as where my gate is or when I should get out of the bus — buses announce there stops via scrolling text and usually voice, and why would you even get on a bus without knowing how many stops you'll be riding or even which direction it should roughly be heading?
There is a whole generation out there (severely generalizing, but it does feel this way sometimes) who completely lack the skills for even basic navigation. Their awareness shifted from actual to digital surroundings, their dependency on technology gradually increasing.
If people want to live like that; fine. But I find this increasing dependency on information fed to you rather than actively sought out worrying.
I know so many people who have absolutely no idea where they are and how to get places simply because they use a navigation app on their phone. Even simple concepts such as "this is approximately x distance south of our current location" escapes people who lose all positional awareness due to reliance on navigation apps.
Oh, and I don't rely on the apps. They are a convenience. I still have my itinerary on paper and ask for printed boarding passes just in case.
Also, this issue is not limited to airports - there's lots and lots of integration to be done.
Say, if I want to take a bus in Bergen (Norway's #2 town, or, if you ask the locals, #1) - you need one app to find out which bus(es) to take, then another to buy a ticket. If you want to buy a ticket for the airport coach? Oh, you'll need another app for that. Actually, you'll need two, as there are two coach companies.
And, getting to Oslo, (#1, or, if you ask the people in Bergen - #2) you'll need another app if you want to take the shuttle train into town, then yet another for getting tickets once you transit to trams/buses in the city centre.
&c. If public transport companies could agree on a way of sharing payments, the market is more than ripe for unified apps for route planning and ticketing, at least on a national level. (Expecting standardization to cross borders is probably a bit of a stretch - and, unless you happen to live in, say, Liechtenstein with half a dozen countries within walking distance (yes, I exaggerate), not much of a concern, really.
(You can actually use the ticket vending machine by the bus stop near my house to buy a ticket which can be used to go by bus from my house to Zürich station, then by express train from there to a station in the mountains, and then by bus up to a ski resort car park, and then by cable car from there to the resort proper, and then by chairlift from there to the top of the mountain, and then it's your ski pass for a day's skiing, and then it takes you home again. One ticket.)
I started writing out the list of steps I go through to visit a new city effectively, but it's much too depressing. There's a huge amount of local knowledge that IMO shouldn't be required just to visit a city as an outsider without getting ripped off.
[1] https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/maps/aPWIrf6H...
NDOV is much more up to date, though not perfect either.
In short: no API gives you actual truth based on GPS or something°, and the NS API itself is unreliable and unmaintained (their app is way beyond what is provided to the public).
° you could say this is nearly impossible, but one could use their GPS and align trains to a track within 15 meters of the reported location, then determine whether it's on schedule. Train tracks are pretty much perfect in OSM data (and I think there are official sources in some weird format from the 80's it seems, designed by HP of all companies) so that's a fine source. There are also sites that interpolate expected position based on schedule and delay data with surprising accuracy (50 meters on a good day I'd estimate, or 500m or so on average), so it's not hard to compare expected vs. actual and determine a delay.
Source: worked on rpln.nl since they killed their mobile site in favor of 5 megabytes of "responsive javascript". Came across a lot of stuff while doing that, and we're still working on features and feature parity with the official stuff (we're feature compatible with the old mobile site, even bookmarks work if you just update the domain, but not as far as the official site because of the unmaintained api).
While not 15m accuracy it's pretty damn good. Probably <500m in urban areas and ~1-2km in rural areas.
If I got an email from someone who looks like the airline I just booked with with all my info (email, name, date, departure, arrival airports, etc) that said I need to update my credit card, I would.
It would be great to start this experiment and eventually come to an API spec that all airports could implement. There is a lot more incentive to build great apps if they can be used at all (or many) of the hubs.
Seems it's of pretty limited value to have an app for one airport, so what you want is an app that can show info for multiple airports. Such an app would be a lot more likely to exist if at least a subset of the API was standardized.
A Hotel app that checks when your flight departs and shows you the best time to take the shuttle bus. When you get a delay, it could give you the option to get a last-minute late check-out, or to book a dinner.
I hope they license their data to third parties so we don't need an api call for each airport though.
those are the most popular
I would not be surprised if this simply exposes data that it passes through from the SITA or Amadeus APIs, or vice versa.
I'm not entirely sure how Amadeus and SITA relate BTW.
Really cool tech and there's a lot that can be developed through the open APIs but they're not very well known about...
No airport that I know of offers some kind of API.
I've never been a big fan of including source and documentation in the same files, because it makes the code harder to scan/understand.
Has some serious restrictions in its use. You are not allowed to "cache" the data for more than 1 day? Strange.
And of course you need an "API key". It is public data, just make it public. HTTP/HTML is also an API, just a bit more cumbersome to parse than JSON.
No it's not, HTML can change anytime. It is meant for human consumption. "API" has the word "Interface" in it because there is a well defined interface to a service, and is documented, and is meant for machine use predominantly.
> API key
While I agree with you, I also think it is important to be able to disable applications that might be misusing the API quickly.
They will want some kind of mechanism to cut off abusive traffic, and API keys are a much better choice than IP blocks.