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No check-in, contactless journey: Dubai Airports chief gives a peek into the future of travel
The entire airport experiences such as check-in, baggage handling, customs and immigration just need to be invisible, seamless and integrated, said Paul Griffiths
Check-in counters at the airports should not exist, and the entire passenger journey should be “invisible”, Paul Griffiths, CEO of Dubai Airports, said while sharing his vision about the aviation sector.
“If you make people travel quickly through an airport and halve the speed of processing, you have doubled the capacity without building anything. No one wants to spend more time queuing, checking in or at security and immigration counters. In the 21st century, we should not be doing that. My vision of the future is the contactless, no red lights and let's not stop,” Griffiths said during a fireside chat at the Dubai Airports’ Learning Week, held in alignment with Global Learning Week on Monday.
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“That allows more time for people to arrive at the most carefully manicured and thought-out hospitality space where we can make our modern Arabian personality speak to our customers. It should be a short walk to your aeroplane. It's going to be a wonderful and personalised experience. To me, this is what we want. We want to focus on hospitality, remove the process, and just surprise and delight every single person who comes to the airport. We can get that vision delivered. I believe we can do it here," he said.
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Issam Kazim, CEO of Dubai Corporation for Tourism and Commerce Marketing (DCTCM), joined Griffiths during the fireside chat.
Suitcase with barcode
He said that in the 21st century where sustainability is such a priority, airports are still sticking paper labels onto suitcases and putting them through the system.
“Why are we doing that? In the US, they have taken a lot of the manual processes away and asked customers to use machines. I see it time and again: a slightly elderly person comes to the airport and the machine spits out a long snake of paper. Then they have to read the back, peel it off one bit, and stick Part A and Part B. Why are we putting people through this? We should be taking all that process away,” Griffiths said during a fireside chat.
He stressed that the entire airport experiences such as check-in, baggage handling, security, customs and immigration just “need to be invisible, seamless and integrated".
“So every bag should have a barcode pre-printed when it's manufactured, so it can be read by any baggage system wherever you are in the world. You just drop it onto a repository, it just disappears and appears at the other end,” he added.
"Check-in shouldn't exist because airlines have already got your money when you booked a ticket. At airports, we must simplify the process, and it becomes like a hotel lobby. You just literally walk in and that's it. Biometrics will deal with your identity, profile, security, customs and immigration. We're almost there. We have the technology to do it. We just got to be bold and be the first airport to say, let's eliminate all these 50-100-year-old processes that we've been practising for far too long, and have the world's first contactless airport," he said during the fireside chat.
Bigger airport is not necessarily better
Griffiths pointed out that huge airports have been created, but that doesn’t necessarily mean they are better.
"They've created much bigger airports. I would argue that bigger airports are not necessarily better airports. Our customers are the most important people. We are an increasingly competitive business. We've got to do better than everyone else because that is the expectation that Dubai has set for the world.
"You come here, it will be better, it will be an experience like you have not had anywhere else, and you will be completely surprised and blown away by the standards that we have created. Our job is to try and translate that vision of customer excellence and hospitality with everyone working together and make sure the airport design and the technology that's embedded in it will fully support that. We've got to be bold and have that powerful vision for the future and work backwards from there,” he said.
He elaborated that even with Covid-19, Dubai International has grown by 20 per cent in the last 10 years without a single piece of major infrastructure.
“That's because we really invested heavily in the people and the connectivity to increase the efficiency,” he said,
While talking about the new Al Maktoum International Airport, he said there is a need for a deep-level underground railway to relieve some of the congestion on the streets.
“We had a very engaging workshop a couple of weeks ago with the RTA (Roads and Transport Authority) on that. We were all convinced that we need to do that. That's going to take a while. The move of the Dubai World Trade Center exhibitions to Expo City is going to help a lot of the traffic congestion around the centre of the city and DIFC,” Griffiths said.
Waheed Abbas
Waheed Abbas is Assistant Editor, covering real estate, aviation and other business stories that dir...Read More
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