I have a question about airline travel.<\/p>\n
Here’s a gross simplification of the airline travel process, in the pre-web days.<\/p>\n
Typically, submitting luggage was performed at the same time as check-in.<\/p>\n
At each step, a certain number of people are going to fail the process. <\/p>\n
People may book but not pay for the ticket, failing to convert from step 1 to step 2.<\/p>\n
People may not turn up at the airport on time (apparently these figures are higher for early morning flights and during peak hour in major cities), failing to convert from step 2 to step 3. <\/p>\n
A relatively small percentage of people successfully check-in but fail to board the plane, failing in the last step.<\/p>\n
Modern innovations have brought some important changes to this process. <\/p>\n
Making a reservation and paying for it at the same time is more common, reducing the failure between the first and second step.<\/p>\n
Non-refundable tickets are more popular, which encourages people to succeed between step 2 and 3.<\/p>\n
Self-service check-in kiosks speeds the processing (or at least reduces the wages overhead) of step 4.<\/p>\n
No-frills flights without luggage removes step 5 entirely in some cases.<\/p>\n
So the conversion rates for the process have improved.<\/p>\n
But the big change I want to talk about is that the airlines web-sites now enable you to print your own boarding pass up to 24 hours in advance – that allows you to swap the order of step 3 and 4, and check-in before you arrive at the airport.<\/p>\n
I do not understand what this achieves, and would love to be enlightened.<\/p>\n
My perception of the purpose of check-in is to enable the airline to get an estimate of how many people are going to attempt the final step or boarding the plane. It isn’t a perfect estimate, as late-comers and people going missing within the airport will continue to vary the number.<\/p>\n
However, I can see that gives them a much better basis to allow them to start allocating tickets to stand-by passengers or to deal with overbooking, as required. The economics of airline travel dictate that empty seats are expensive – leaving one empty seat per failed ticket conversion would be wasteful – hence the practice of overbooking and the offer of stand-by travel.<\/p>\n
However, if check-in is permitted the day before the flight, there will still be a significant number of checked-in people who oversleep, get stuck in traffic or otherwise fail to show.<\/p>\n
On the other hand, if I am wrong, and the airlines don’t consider post-check-in no-shows to be a problem, then why not extend the check-in time to 48 hours in advance? 1 week in advance? Why not do it when you pay for your ticket? It is may be that there are many unknowns that might prevent meaningfully deciding on the seat allocation 6 weeks before the flight, but don’t those same unknowns apply 24 hours before, too?<\/p>\n