Christmas break is over, and I had a really good time travelling around Europe. I was lucky enough to skip some heavy snow storms when I was flying into Germany in December and the train system worked pretty good in Germany, Austria and Italy.
The low point however was airport experience. Supposedly air travel decreases the total journey time, but if we consider short-haul trips within Europe train travel could take almost the same amount of time.
Consider that you need to be in the airport at least 2 hours before takeoff, because you need to go through the check-in and baggage drop-off procedures, the "security" process and then boarding; then you have a 1 hour flight and once you are in your destination you need to go through customs and retrieve your baggage, which could take another hour if you are lucky. So a theoretically 1 hour flight takes in reality at least 4 hours
In our first Operation Management lesson, the airport example came up when we were talking about bad operations affecting customer experience; in first place a pre-printed boarding pass will not save you time, it will save the airline some money in printing the boarding passes themselves. We all print the boarding pass and we end up in the same line to get to the airline counter anyway.
Second, the endless security process is frustrating - I read that you have the same probabilities to be killed by a terrorist attack in an airplane than by radiation from the airport scanners (check here, in Spanish) -, not only you have to wait in endless lines, but once is your turn you have to quickly strip off your coat, belt, shoes and pockets (not easy in Winter) and then put everything back on and take your bags before the next person is through.
Finally, add bad weather conditions and new terminals and you get chaos.
Second, the endless security process is frustrating - I read that you have the same probabilities to be killed by a terrorist attack in an airplane than by radiation from the airport scanners (check here, in Spanish) -, not only you have to wait in endless lines, but once is your turn you have to quickly strip off your coat, belt, shoes and pockets (not easy in Winter) and then put everything back on and take your bags before the next person is through.
Finally, add bad weather conditions and new terminals and you get chaos.
Now the questions are who is in charge of the different operations within the airport? How can they deal with these problems in advance next year? What metrics are they using to measure operations efficiency?
* Picture from dailymail.co.uk
* Picture from dailymail.co.uk
Posts
Gonz,
ReplyDeleteI am not sure what airline you were flying with, but at least on my last two trips (Cathay Pacific and British Airways) there was actually a different line for baggage drop (for when you have already printed the boarding pass online) and for check-in . This has resulted in quite an expedite visit to the counter since the baggage drop line is usually empty. I would assume the distinction between these lines depends mostly on the airline rather than on the airport operations.
I do agree that the security process is a big hustle. The fast operational response to long queues (and long waiting times) would be to increase the number of servers. I believe airports usually do not react fast enough to increases in passenger queues and take too long to open new security lines. Here is an interesting study that took place at the YVR airport and that deals with precisely this problem. http://www.lionhrtpub.com/orms/orms-4-03/queue.html
The other way to expedite the security process would be to decrease the individual service time of each server, however I think the bottleneck there is the baggage scan and there is not much to do about it. I do agree that there should be more room to actually have time to grab your stuff and put your coat and belt back on.
Anyway, I got super exited with you OR post! Come visit me in Vancouver and we'll see is YVR works well!
Besos!
Hi Nela,
ReplyDeleteI'm glad to be able to discuss some interesting issues like this one with you, thanks for your insight.
I think the airline might have a lot to do with the drop-off queue even when you have already printed your boarding pass, because I travelled back from Italy in Ryanair.
Most people travelling with Ryanair just travel with hand luggage, so everyone ends up in the same queue to have a passport check. They also use alternative airports (in my case Treviso, close to Venice but not its main airport), that probably don't have enough resources to handle a large number of travellers.
Abrazos!!