- - - - - - - - - - - - -

Wednesday, October 29, 2008

When a lack of service is sold as service


DIY to beat check-in queues
Air New Zealand domestic travellers will from Monday be able to print bag tags, drop their luggage directly on to a conveyor belt, and get their boarding pass using their mobile phone. The new self-service approach, designed to speed up the check-in and boarding process, will see almost 40 check-in kiosks replace many traditional service desks at Auckland airport.

Isn’t it incredible how a lack of service can be sold by Air NZ as a service and because Air NZ has so much advertising power when they crack the whip, all the media dutifully follow through and mouth the lines. How can having to check your own luggage and boarding pass be a service? The claim is this will cut down waiting time, I have rarely had to wait very long to board a domestic flight and the responsibility is the check in persons where as the responsibility is dumped on the passenger and sold as a ‘service’. Incredible!

4 Comments:

At 29/10/08 10:54 am, Blogger Paul said...

speed things up HA! ever stood in line for one of those fancy 'self checkouts'? soo many just don't fucking get it, or they take forever to find the barcode and scan it, or they can't find which type of apple they have in the menus. Or they can't see the sign that says 'put cash in this slot'.

Bah.

 
At 29/10/08 1:56 pm, Anonymous Anonymous said...

If you are going to work on the 7.30 am flight to Wellington, the last thing you want to be doing is standing in a queue for check-in. The self service systems that Air NZ is introducing are aimed squarely at frequent flyers, who don’t want to wait in line whilst Ethel from Masterton is checked in for her first flight in forty years. All these business types want is to get their snouts into the Koru Lounge trough as quick as possible.

The only thing that is incredible is your knee-jerk, anti-corporate reaction that shows a lack of experience and understanding of the needs of different sorts of customers. Something a recently graduated, silly girly, fresh from AUT Journalism School baby reporter for the Granny Herald would be proud of.

What’s more important, and the question you should have asked, is what’s going to happen to the front line Air NZ employees who are seeing a dramatic change in their roles? All these guys have are the oily assurances from Air NZ CEO Rob Fyfe that their jobs are safe and that no redundancies are forecast.
What’s going to happen when the inevitable cutbacks happen? Are we going to see job dis-establishment or redundancies? Why haven’t the unions said anything?

 
At 29/10/08 3:16 pm, Blogger Steve Withers said...

I've used these kiosks in Toronto and Vancouver. They certainly did speed things up. You just walk up to them and point and click until they spit out a boarding pass. Most useful for domestic travel where passports aren't a factor.

 
At 31/10/08 1:47 am, Anonymous Anonymous said...

Just go business class Bomber, I find NZ business class pretty good. Apart from anything else keeps me away from the NZ riff raff.

 

Post a Comment

<< Home