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United Airlines will enable touchless baggage check at an additional 195 airports on Tuesday.
The move means that the carrier will be offering its touchless solution at a total of approximately 220 airports, said managing director of insights and innovation Maria Walter.
The broad deployment will come less than a month after United’s introduction of the technology, which it developed in response to the Covid-19 pandemic. United rolled out touchless bag check on a trial basis May 10 in Orlando, Boston, Chicago O’Hare and Dallas/Fort Worth. It has since moved the technology into approximately 20 more airports.
The touchless experience has been enabled by a software update to the carrier’s traditional check-in kiosks. To use the feature, customers must check-in prior to airport arrival and pre-pay baggage fees. They can then scan a mobile or printed boarding pass in a slot just below the kiosk screen. Bag tags will automatically print.
United, like other airlines, has drastically cut capital expenditures since the onset of the Covid-19 crisis. But Walter said the carrier was able to implement this solution at very little cost. The carrier’s in house staff simply wrote new software code.
“We’re always looking out for ways to innovate quickly,” she said. “We knew we needed to act fast to deliver things that would be appealing in this new world.”
United has been the first major U.S. airline to deploy touchless bag-check capabilities.
Source: travelweekly.com
