News

Frankfurt flyers lead uptake of mobile self-service, kiosks

January 17, 2012

According to corporate travel and meetings site ITCM, passengers at Frankfurt International Airport are leading the way on the uptake of mobile self-service travel solutions.

Flyers at the German airport have the highest use rate of mobile boarding passes of the major airport hubs included in the 2011 SITA/Air Transport World Passenger Self-Service Survey, with 37 percent of Frankfurt respondents reporting the use of a mobile boarding pass at least once, compared to 17 percent worldwide.

The site said the uptick is due to a combination of high service availability and the fact that the number of smartphones carried by passengers has more than doubled in Frankfurt in the past year, jumping to 54 percent of interviewed passengers compared to just 24 percent last year.

The rising influence of the smartphone is a key finding from the 6th annual SITA/Air Transport World Passenger Self-Service Survey carried out with a representative sample of the 283.5 million passengers who pass through six of the world's leading airport hubs: Abu Dhabi International Airport; Beijing International Airport; Frankfurt International Airport; Hartsfield-Jackson, in Atlanta; Chhatrapati Shivaji International Airport, in Mumbai; and Sao Paulo Guarulhos.

Reflecting a worldwide trend, Frankfurt passengers are interested in receiving trip-related information on a smartphone with 67 percent requesting information on gate changes; wait times at security, 42 percent; time to departure gate, 42 percent; and at Frankfurt, 23 percent of passengers would be willing to pay for such services.

Self-service check-in at Frankfurt increased by 50 percent in one year, jumping from 41 percent in 2010 to 60 percent in 2011. Use of the 73 SITA-installed Common-Use Self-Service (CUSS) kiosks is particularly popular, whether in Terminals 1 and 2 or the AIRail Terminal. Thirty-six percent of passengers interviewed at Frankfurt Airport used a kiosk to check-in, compared to a kiosk-use rate of 28.5 percent in the survey overall.

While use of established self-service channels continues to grow, new self-service channels such as mobile check-in (24 percent) and self-boarding gates (37 percent) are being rapidly adopted.

Boris Padovan, SITA Regional Vice President for East and Central Europe, said that the results from Frankfurt show clearly "that wide availability of multiple self-service options is key to passenger adoption. In other words, if it's readily available passengers will use it."

Read more about self-service in transportation and travel.