Airline speeds self-service check-in

Continental signs deal with Expand Networks

Continental Airlines has speeded up its deployment of passenger ticketing kiosks at airports using application acceleration technology.

The airline has been able to deliver four times as many eService kiosks at one-third of the cost using technology from IT firm Expand Networks.

The accelerators have also increased the speed that the kiosks process information and download data by 10 times.

When passengers use the self-service check-in kiosks, systems need to confirm information stored on Continental Airlines’ ticketing database in North Carolina via its secure wide area network.

Expand Networks’ accelerators compress, cache and speed up data and graphics travelling between the airline’s reservation system and airports.

‘The kiosk application needs quite a lot of bandwidth because the seat map is a pretty big graphic,’ said Stacey Thomas, senior telecommunications manager at Continental Airlines.

‘Everything comes back to our mainframe in the US, so this provides a quicker experience for passengers and it is much more effective for the rollout of kiosks.’

The airline has already installed the technology at 38 airports in the US, and is introducing it at airports in 14 other countries, including the UK.

‘We can get by with a 256kbit/s circuit in some places where we would probably have needed a 1.5Mbit/s connection to handle this requirement,’ said Thomas.

Continental Airlines plans to extend the project to other airports this year, and says it will include the application accelerators in all its airport kiosk installations.

‘There is the advantage of customers being able to check themselves in rather than have to wait in the queue. It speeds up the whole process,’ said Thomas.