Heathrow Tackle Delays with Electronic Border Management Solutions

All over the world, airports have been wrestling with the notoriously difficult and time-consuming aspects of inner-terminal processes – departures.  The entire check-in process is laborious and exhausting for both passengers and airport staff and is the biggest cause of ground delays, queuing time and missed revenue.

It has to be said that the introduction of electronic border management solutions has made leaps and bounds on the road to improving this procedure.  Online check-in and bag drop kiosks are helping to streamline the check-in process and is bringing down waiting times.

London Heathrow has led the way in this field for a number of years, being the first to trial self-service check-in operations and multiple airline baggage handling and check-in solutions.  Passenger processing is fast-becoming ultra-efficient, reducing waiting times and significantly improving the entire experience for both passengers and airlines.

Mark Walker, Heathrow Airports Leader of the Passenger Processing Program says, “We’ve been taking quite a rigorous approach to exploring what good ideas we’ve got in-house or with our airlines, or indeed with industry best practices that are emerging, trialling some of those to really understand whether it is what our passengers want here at Heathrow, and then selectively deploying those technologies.”

Electronic Border Management encompass not just check-in and baggage handling, but also Advanced Passenger Information System solutions to allow government departments access to critical passenger data ahead of the scheduled departure.  Border Control Agencies are then able to spot high-risk passengers and expedite low-risk passengers, which also helps to streamline the process of check-in and boarding, minimising the risk of ground-delays.