You may not have known it thanks to the regular posting schedule, but I was on vacation with the family last week. I’ll have a full trip report to follow, but today I thought I’d talk about how it went using Alaska’s new vision for an airport without kiosks. In short, it was great.
On the way up, we flew from Los Angeles to Redmond/Bend in Oregon. At LAX, we still had to use the ancient, slow kiosks to get our bag tags printed and then go wait in line to drop them. That kiosk really is clunky, and while it didn’t slow us down by all that much, it could have been quicker and less frustrating to use.
On the return, we came back out of Portland, and that is Alaska’s first hub to implement the new system, so I was excited to put it to the test.
I had us checked in using my phone the day before travel. I paid for the one checked bag we needed in the app, and I added my boarding passes to Google Wallet. So, we were all set before arriving at the airport with the one exception being we had to drop the bag off.
The airport is under construction in many areas, so I don’t imagine this is the final setup, but there is now a large space where the counter is gone and instead there are banks of iPads where you can print a bag tag.
You’ll notice that kiosks are still lining the back wall here in Portland. I believe those are there currently to allow passport confirmation for international travel. (At least the signs say something about international travel back there.) I naturally went right to the iPad.
When you walk up, you do not need to tap anything. The barcode scanner is on. I just opened my boarding pass in Google Wallet, and it almost immediately popped up the next screen saying a tag would be printing in 5 seconds. The extra time was there in case I needed to add another bag that wasn’t already in the original check-in.
The bag tags printed in no time. Since we didn’t need to add more bags, I don’t believe I touched the screen once in the entire process, if I remember right. It just did the work after the initial scan.
We affixed the tags to the luggage as normal, and then we followed the sign to step 2, the bag drop.
Alaska currently has a line-minder sitting at the entrance to this area making sure people are actually there to drop bags. In the photo above, you can see a guy who had some long story that I didn’t fully catch, but he needed an agent to help. The line-minder directed him over to the counters next door which were labeled for “Assistance for Dummies.” (Ok, maybe it was just “Assistance.”)
With him out of the way, we walked in and there was another agent halfway down the line with an iPad who scanned the tag and checked IDs to ensure we were good to go. Once that was done, we walked forward to the old counter.
You can see our bag on the right getting whisked away off the scale. It worked like a charm.
The airport was not busy, but it did feel like there were just a lot of agents standing around with nothing to do. My assumption is that over time there will be fewer of them around, because this process is just so quick and simple that fewer people should be needed to assist.
Like I said, there’s construction going on so this may not be the completely final configuration, but after having used it myself, I’m sold on the idea. Buh bye, kiosks.
