Comments on: Southwest Introduces Unique Ticket Counter at LaGuardia

By: JPbeme

JPbeme — Sun, 12 Jul 2009 04:47:47 +0000

Wow. Only took them 5 years to copy Alaska Airlines. Well, it is true that imitation is the highest form of flattery. Perhaps in this case it’s jealousy.

By: Laura

Laura — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 02:15:07 +0000

Bust thru walls or shift the counter 90 degrees and continue on to security/concourse/bag drop? The traffic flow is great either way. Kudos to all who thought this up.

By: CF

CF — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 14:11:09 +0000

Laura – That’s a little different than what Southwest is doing at LaGuardia. At Indianapolis (similar to what you find in many airports, like SFO’s international terminal), the ticket counters are shifted 90 degrees. So when you walk in, instead of running into the ticket counter, they run parallel to your path into the terminal. That does make it easier to go through than the traditional setup.

What Southwest has done (and others before) is take the traditional ticket counter and just bust through the walls. So you walk up to the ticket counter as you normally would, but then you just walk right through where it used to be.

By: Laura

Laura — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 10:58:02 +0000

The new Indianapolis airport that opened last fall has walk-thru counters for all the airlines. It’s great for traffic flow.

By: Stephen Dutton

Stephen Dutton — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 04:04:49 +0000

For us tech people we love all this push and go stuff, but what if Walt and Deb turn up to go to see their grandkids and look at it like mum looks at me when I say I’m doing my Blog which is totally dumbfounded.
its easy they say, hummmm….they say!
“But where do we put the suitcases dear”……”did you print the ticket?”…”print what ticket Walt”…..”what is aTwitter?”….”you dear!” then multiply that by 50 and you have total chaos, me I like a pretty lady that gives me a boarding pass a window seat and takes my cases away and is now looking more and more like a bygone luxury.

By: David Parker Brown

David Parker Brown — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 18:47:01 +0000

The new setup looks great. I hope more airlines will follow in Southwest and AlaskaAir’s footsteps with changing out the ticket counter works. I just hope that passengers can keep up with the change.

By: Nicholas Barnard

Nicholas Barnard — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 18:10:00 +0000

Steve,
Southwest has this covered quite nicely.. Take a look at http://crankyflier.com/2009/04/08/southwests-interesting-new-york-laguardia-schedule-construction/ where cranky details how they’ve constructed their schedule.

By: Steve

Steve — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 18:04:21 +0000

yea yea, its “wonderful.” Now how does SW intend to keep its ontime operation when a large number of its flights will now fly out of one of the most horribly delayed airports in the world? I guess they could build three hours of “turn time” in as opposed to some idiot airlines who think they can turn a plane at LGA in 30 minutes and not delay the entire system. (The cynical comments also apply to JFK, EWR, and ORD).

By: Oliver

Oliver — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 15:51:33 +0000

Great setup, very slick and flier friendly!!

By: David SFeastbay

David SFeastbay — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 15:24:49 +0000

What ever works to keep things moving can only be a plus.