The human factor

Well there we were – in London Heathrow’s Terminal 5, roughly a year after it opened, to check-in for our flight to Canada. As I was not in the self-service check-in mood, I was looking for a conventional check-in desk but was told that there weren’t any. So we had to take the self-service kiosk plus bag-drop desk route.

There were lots of kiosks around, so we didn’t have to queue to get started. Sometimes we use the booking reference to start the transaction, but this time we decided to scan our passports. We initiated the check-in by scanning my wife’s passport first, but that failed and stalled the process with no indication as to what we needed to do next. So we called the airline service agent. It turned out that it read my wife’s date of birth by concatenating the two-digit date of birth with the last two digits of the year of birth, missing out the month altogether, thus creating the year of birth as 1861.

As a result the agent had to enter my wife’s passport information manually on a computer terminal behind a bank of kiosks. I then went back to the kiosk to scan my passport. This was read without a glitch, which came as a bit of a surprise because both our passports were from the same issuer and were supposed to be machine readable. It just proved that humans are still very much needed in this process and that the self-service check-in software, like any other software, has bugs that can halt the application.

Moments later we had our boarding passes and were on our way to the bag-drop. Again there were lots of desks available, but we soon found that we had to join one of many long queues. The signs above the desks stated ‘Fast Bag Drop’, but it was anything but fast that morning. When I asked why, I was told that they were short staffed. So once again it seemed that humans were required in greater numbers.

T5 is a really remarkable terminal and I like it. It is airy with lots of light and has good and sufficient facilities provided by the airport operator. The main problems were the software supplier’s application and the fact that the airline didn’t have enough staff to make the whole process as efficient as it should be. Great facilities and ambience are not sufficient on their own, nor are great staff and customer service without well designed, functional and spacious facilities. It proves that it is only when all parties involved bring their best together that passengers can expect to get that magic touch of service excellence.

D. George Hohlacov, president of Lavikon Aviation Consulting Inc.

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