…Picked up from “How Can We Make It Better?”…

Now there has got to be an IVR-like solution for the airport.

According to an article in the Wall Street Journal, there may be.

The answer is simple: automate everything.

The IVR call center certainly saved a lot of time wading through operators and phone trees in the same way that self check-in kiosks at airport ticketing have severely cut down on the wait.

So why not introduce this same technology across the board?

According to the article, Alaska Airlines, a long-time leader in airport tech, has introduced brand new self-baggage check stations where passengers tag and check their own bags, eliminating the need to wait for a representative.

These self-tagging stations are taking off where implemented and are saving huge chunks of time for frequent fliers.

Under that same logic, Jet Blue recently introduced the world’s first self-boarding gates at the Las Vegas airport, where you scan your ticket yourself and head directly down the gate to your plane.

In a study on the new tech, 70% of fliers said that self-boarding appealed to them, meaning that we’re probably going to see a lot more of these swinging doors and scanners in the airports of the future.

In fact, the International Air Transport Association is now pushing for completely self-service airports to service 80% of fliers by 2020. That means that the first human you would talk to at the airport would be a flight attendant.

And while the self-service airport has yet to be fully implemented, this could significantly reduce the amount of time it takes to get from the curb to your seat.

The only problem that remains is the not-so-frequent flyer who gets confused by the system and slows us all down.

Thankfully though, much like an IVR system, a more automated airport means more available employees.

You see, when you implement an IVR system you free up your employees to help those callers who need extra assistance or have a question that’s too complicated for the software to handle.

More airport machines means freer employees who can spend more time assisting the airline-naïve and speeding up their process so that we can all get where we’re going a little faster.