New Gen Kiosk implementation with Cloud first approach
Overview.
Largest airline in the UK based on fleet size, international flights and international destinations that operates over 400 aircrafts, carries over 62 million passengers annually and serves more than 200 destinations. Airline’s ambitious goal was to deliver better customer self-check-in experience at airports across the world:
Disruption handling and flight ancillaries purchase (increase success rate, increase functionality and increased customer eligibility)
A less than desirable boarding pass issuance success rate of 60%
A low rate of passenger self-service eligibility for check-in
A lengthy time to market release cycle of 6 months
Rising hardware & software operating costs and development timelines
Solution.
Touchpoint project implemented new Check-in Kiosks for passengers travelling by BA at Terminal 5 in London Heathrow Airport. These Kiosks are supported by cutting edge technology running at the back-end. Application consists of Web front end developed using Angular JS running on Amazon AWS platform, and back-end micro services which acts as interface with Amadeus and other systems like Timatic. Front end runs on Check-in kiosks and interacts with scanner and printer on the kiosk to read passport details and print Boarding Pass or KAC (Kiosk Assistant Coupon) respectively. Business logic is implemented using Microservices written in Java Spring Boot which validates the Passport details, check the booking and does visa validation from Timatic before printing the Boarding pass. This application is not dependent on BA network, and Kiosks kept working during recent Network outage in BA. Customers have been appreciating new kiosks and its performance, the success rate of transactions on these kiosks is more than 97% and it caters more than 10,000 passengers a week with 12 Kiosks and plan is to increase the kiosks to 80.
