A few days ago Schiphol announced that it would be using eye-recognition to board travellers at one of KLM's departure gates. The three-month trial aims to evaluate the speed, reliability and user-friendliness of the technology.
The search by airports and airlines to identify ways to ease the traveller's passage through one of travel's major pain points is not new. Indeed KLM's own partner Air France trialled doing this via NFC technology in Nice half a dozen years ago and in Toulouse more recently.
This is only one small example of the technology existing to ease traveller stress but this not translating into results. Not many airports allow you to go from check-in to gate merely by flashing either your phone or your eyes.
Traveller centricity is high on the list of travel manager concerns. Reducing traveller friction is high on corporate travel objectives and yet it seems that very little progress in overall corporate norms is made. The answer probably lies in the fact that many of the problems are external to the corporate and many of the solutions lie in goods and services within the domain of individual suppliers and TMCs and, unlike the use of a smartphone or iPad, many of these have not moved from their one supplier to standard corporate kit.
The airport example can be fairly easily explained. The time from home or office to departure gate is the most painful and least time-effective part of most business travel journeys and yet this is, if anything, often longer now than they were half a century ago. Gains from high-speed links have been offset by heavier traffic and slower transit times for those, and those parts of the journey, that do not make use of these options. Mobile check-in and automated baggage tagging have been outweighed by longer security lines and more checks. Smartphones can be used only with airlines that allow a mobile pass to be downloaded at airports that have the supporting technology. The time it takes to pass through security can have as much to do with geography as any airport technology or management process.
Whereas once IATA could set standards for airlines and airports, we now see business travellers using non-IATA carriers and airports also subject to regulations from their governments.
By the same token much of what makes a traveller's booking and expense management experience is determined by what technology and systems have been chosen by the corporate. This can mean choosing systems that are IT- or accounts-friendly rather than traveller-friendly and offering content dependent on the system's maker or provider.
In a recent interview in Tnooz (https://www.tnooz.com/article/dean-forbes-kds-corporate-travel/ ), former KDS ceo Dean Forbes said that he saw solutions coming from new entrants into the business travel market such as Booking.com and Airbnb because they had been built for the consumer market.
Many B2B products, services and infrastructure were just never built with the consumer in mind — and business travellers are very demanding consumers.