Alaska Airlines does away with check-in kiosks | Hacker News Reader

Alaska Airlines does away with check-in kiosks

techcrunch.com

15 pointspseudolus15 comments

Much of the change doesn't seem like a very big deal. They aren't "doing away with" kiosks entirely, just replacing the current interfaces with ipads.

But this line jumped out at me:

> These bag drops will also mark the first time Alaska will use biometric data to authenticate travelers

That's a hard "no" from me. I don't want yet another company, with likely shoddy software and security, handling biometric data.

Relevant portion about iPads vs kiosks. Big fan of doing more software in house!

> Any change on the kiosk, you’d have to work with a vendor and that takes about six weeks. With [iPads], we can roll out changes very quickly and it’s a very simple and good user experience.

That is nuts to read. One other dev and myself created the original system in-house for Alaska in 1999, it ran for years. Of course some C Suite genius out sourced it.

Still waiting on the mobile app to at least remember my reservation so I don't have to spend 3 minutes at the kiosk searching through emails.

We had a scare where my wife's phone ran out of juice in the security line. Can't board a plane! Luckily my phone was able to find the reservation.

Important info buried at the end

>It’s worth noting that Alaska is obviously aware that not everybody will be able to check in online. Agents will remain available for assistance, and Jain emphasized that travelers will continue to have this option.

So literally nothing is improving and it's just getting worse. You will still have kiosks, they will just now be limited functionality kiosks...Awesome!

Of course they are 'limited functionality' kiosks, they exist to print boarding passes!

As someone who's worked on "kiosks" in a very general sense, an iPad is infinitely nicer to use than any other piece of hardware being used for that purpose.

Kiosks tend to be really crappy hardware sold under the guise of being rugged, but are really run of the mill SoCs shoved in metal cases.

How are you supposed to scan a boarding pass if there's no kiosk to print one? Are they expecting everyone to print them out at home? Surely not...

This news fills me with discomfort, in the same way that restaurants which lack menus do ("just scan our QR code, then scroll endlessly on your tiny screen!") Really not a fan of bottlenecking every service through smartphones, which are OK for killing time on light entertainment, but really suck for getting anything practical done.

As they mention in the article, 70% already have their boarding pass on their phone already. It’s actually much easier to add a boarding pass to your mobile wallet than it is to do check-in at the airport. Mostly because you get to skip the line and bustle at the airport and do it at your leisure.

And once it’s in your mobile wallet, a button to access it appears on your phone screen within a few hours of the flight. So it’s just one tap at the airport.

It’s really not a bottleneck, to be honest. It’s a big time-saver for me vs trying to remember where my paper boarding pass ended up.

I am one of those 30% and would like to remain in that group, which is the source of my concern. I don't have or want a mobile wallet (assuming that is a generic term for Apple Pay and whatever Google's version is).

I would like them to use the facial recognition DHS/TSA has and skip the paper altogether.

They can print boarding passes at the counter as well.

Ah, that's fine then!

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