TRAVEL WEEKLY NEWS | Airline Passengers and Travelers top priorities
Travelers have expressed their dismay over the years about their concerns and things they would like to see improve when it comes to being an airline passenger. With the digital trends, passengers “are putting their hopes behind technology when it comes to improving the travel experience over the coming years.”
The 2019 Global Passenger Survey, just released by the International Air Transport Association (IATA), showed that airline passengers want to have more personal control over their journey via their smartphone, and want to be able to do track their baggage more effectively and get through screening points more quickly.
The additional priorities highlighted by the IATA study include the following:
Being able to use biometric identification to speed up travel processes;
Wanting a maximum wait time of 10 minutes for baggage collection and immigration/customs; and,
Access to Wi-Fi onboard at 34,000 feet.
The control over the journey also includes using their personal devices to control more aspects of the experience - from booking to arrival.
Statistics show that airline apps are apparently the preferred method of booking, particularly in North Asia.
Booking via an app was the second most popular choice among passengers in the Middle East.
Booking through an airline website, although less popular than in 2018, remains the method of choice for most travelers globally 39%
When it comes to check-in, using a smartphone was also identified by more than half of passengers as their preferred option.
Most passengers say they want to be kept informed throughout their journey via travel notifications sent to their personal device. SMS remains the top notification option for 39 percent of passengers, but this trend has been decreasing since 2016, the study found.
Conversely, preference for receiving information via a smartphone app has increased by 10% since 2016 and is now the method of choice for one-third of passengers. The survey found that 83% of passengers want to receive information on the status of their flight and 45% would like information on their baggage.
Biometric Technology
Biometric technology is another top priority for airline passengers around the globe, especially when it involves speeding up airport processes.
The IATA survey found that 70% of passengers are willing to share additional personal information including their biometric identifiers to speed up processes at the airport. The highest support for this is found among fliers who travel for business more than 10 times per year.
In addition, 46% of passengers would prefer to use biometric identification instead of a paper passport for their journey and 30% would opt to use a biometric token to board the plane.
"Passengers are willing to share more personal information if it removes the hassle from their travel experience. But it's clear that concerns over data privacy remain. While the majority of passengers want to use biometric identification instead of a paper passport, 53 percent of those that did not, said they were concerned about the security of their data. Passengers need to be confident that their data is safe," Alexandre de Juniac, IATA's director general and CEO, said in a statement.
Baggage tracking
Another big issue for travelers is baggage tracking. More than half of passengers, 53%, said they would be more likely to check their bag if they were able to track it throughout the journey, while 46% said they would want to be able to track their bag and have it delivered directly to an off-airport location, if that service were available.
Airlines and airports are working together to improve baggage information reliability by tracking baggage at major touch points such as loading and unloading.
Finally, in a not entirely shocking revelation, time is of the essence for passengers. The new survey indicated that 80 percent of passengers want to wait no longer than three minutes to drop off a bag. This increased to 10 minutes for queuing at immigration/customs for 79 percent of travelers.
Meanwhile, a mere two percent of passengers would accept a waiting time longer than 20 minutes.
About 74 percent of passengers say they want to wait no longer than 10 minutes for baggage delivery. And almost none wants to wait longer than 20 minutes (not shocking).
The survey also found that for nearly three quarters (74 percent) of passengers, speed was the main benefit of using automated immigration gates/kiosks. A similar number (72 percent) gave the overall experience of automated immigration processing a thumbs up.
The 2019 survey results were based on 10,877 responses from passengers across 166 countries. The full report can be viewed here.
Happy Traveling,
The Luxe and Lavish Travels Team