12 Things to Look Forward to at the Airport of the Future

Tencent and Alibaba are racing into the airport business. It will only be worth something once it gets this far.

After wealth management and ride-hailing, airports have become the latest prize for China's internet giants.

On June 16, Alibaba announced a strategic partnership with Shanghai Airport Authority, its first attempt to build a "future airport" around the Alipay wallet. Spending inside the airport, and even in the surrounding commercial district, mainly Shanghai Disneyland, will be connected to Alipay. For now, Alibaba still treats the airport as a business district in the far suburbs. In the future, it wants Alipay to be a one-stop platform for everything to do with flying.

Two days later, Tencent announced the same thing. With Shanghai Airport Authority's Hongqiao and Pudong airports added, more than ten "smart airports" now use WeChat Pay as their entry point. The WeChat team wants more than QR-code payments in airport shops. It wants to cover the whole trip, from before departure to after landing, and to let travelers check in online, rent cars, book hotels, find their way around the terminal, connect to WiFi with one tap and more, all through WeChat official accounts.

But in QDaily's own experience, the "smart airports" these companies have built so far are a long way from smart.

At Shanghai Pudong Airport, which has only just joined, the shops, restaurants and FamilyMart convenience stores do not yet accept WeChat Pay. Whatever you do, don't leave your wallet at home.

Beijing Capital Airport opened its WeChat official account earlier, but all it offers is a list of airport information. About the only thing it might let you do is scan a QR code to board, and that is not unique to WeChat. If you have bags to check, you will still have to queue for a boarding pass like everyone else.

Over last week's Dragon Boat Festival holiday, Alipay offered free VIP lounge access at Shanghai Hongqiao and Pudong airports to users with a Sesame Credit score above 700. Just when you thought Alibaba had finally lost patience with the state of China's airport lounges, it turned out the offer was capped at 50 people a day. It was little more than a tease.

Plenty of scattered experiments in smart airports and travel already exist. We have pieced them together into a picture of an airport of the future that is not far off. It turns out to be a future worth looking forward to.

Knowing when to leave, and not just from the drive

How do you pretend it isn't your first flight? Whatever you do, don't get to the airport too early. Frequent-flying business travelers rely on experience to leave themselves just enough time for a cup of coffee before boarding.

But no amount of experience prevents the occasional slip. As the saying goes, "If you've never missed a flight, you've spent too much time in airports."

Ideally, you would know exactly how much time to allow. That depends on many things: your route to the airport, the traffic, and how long security takes once you arrive.

Travel time on the road is already easy to estimate. Ride-hailing apps can work out how long a trip will take from traffic conditions. Security wait times no longer look that hard either. In April this year, the airport in Austin, Texas tried one approach: gauging crowds by the density of mobile phones in the security area and the restrooms.

Almost everyone carries a phone. Even if a phone is not connected to the airport network, as long as its Wi-Fi is switched on, the wireless hotspots can tell how many phones are nearby. For more precise positioning, there is iBeacon, the Bluetooth technology common in retail stores. London Heathrow and Germany's Frankfurt Airport now use iQueue, a Bluetooth-based system. By monitoring how passengers queue, how long they linger and how they pass through access points, airports can understand passenger behavior and remove obstacles on the way to the gate.

Once flight information and this data are combined with ride-hailing apps such as Didi, Kuaidi and Uber, the hard-won instincts of an Up in the Air road warrior will matter much less. The app can work out when you need to leave from the traffic, remind you to book a car in good time, or simply book it for you.

More robots, more self-service

Greg Fordham, executive director of the database company Airbiz, once said: "Within five years, terminals will no longer need any human agent services." As airports fill with self-service machines, they will need fewer and fewer ground staff.

Leave the robots aside for now. Patrick Yeung, chief executive of Hong Kong Dragon Airlines, has said that "by 2025, automated self-service technology running on smartphones will let travelers check their bags at McDonald's, or check in while buying coffee at Starbucks."

AirAsia's self-service bag drop

If you have no overweight luggage, most domestic flights in China already let you check in through the airline's website or mobile app. Abroad, checking bags has gone self-service too. A machine weighs the bag, you attach the label, and it goes onto the conveyor belt. AirAsia has even launched a service that lets you print your own bag tags at home: print the information on A4 paper and tape it to your luggage.

What you still need is a mobile app that tracks where your luggage is, so you can find it quickly if it goes missing.

On international flights, the longest queue is usually at customs and immigration. The United States now generally builds biometric information into the QR code on passports. At the checkpoint, you just scan the code, and staff no longer have to collect each arriving foreigner's information.

A fast security lane that may raise privacy concerns

Faster still, the US Department of Homeland Security is bringing in laser-based molecular body scanners made by Genia Photonics. They are ten million times faster than conventional scanners and work at up to 50 meters, so scanning several travelers at once is no problem.

The VIP lounge business could be much bigger

Today, lounge access comes bundled with very expensive tickets. The trouble is that on a two-hour domestic flight, few people will pay several thousand yuan extra for a lounge that is barely roomier and not especially pleasant. Far more would pay 100 yuan for an hour of quiet, a bed and a shower.

Sleepbox

In 2011, "sleep boxes" appeared for the first time at an airport in Moscow, charging US$15 an hour. They are a little like Japanese capsule hotels. Each box measures 3 square meters and comes with a mattress, lights, an alarm clock, a desk and internet TV. By 2012, Sleepbox, a start-up from Russia's Arch Group, had installed its boxes at Xi'an Xianyang International Airport in China.

The service keeps improving, and you can now book a Sleepbox online. A single room costs around 160 yuan, about the same as a standard chain hotel. It also offers a bundle of services covering boarding, security and bag check. And yes, you will get a receipt for your expense claim.

A sleeping capsule at Helsinki Airport

Major airlines keep upgrading their lounges to hold on to elite members. Meanwhile, this year Helsinki Airport in Finland installed 19 sleeping capsules just for transfer passengers. Services like this, more convenient than a lounge, are becoming a trend.

Free paid content, to get you buying

Just as you have learned to get to the airport early, leisure travelers pack a few books or films, and business travelers load their iPads with files. Airport WiFi, after all, is never much good.

By partnering with carriers or phone makers, video sites could make streaming work reliably over airport-only WiFi. It would be a good chance for them to promote their paid services. Airport shoppers may be more willing than most to pay for content, and airports see a lot of people every day. Tencent Video, for example, could unlock a few Hollywood films to promote its Hollywood membership plan. iQiyi, Sohu and Youku could do the same.

Using spare minutes at the airport to figure out how the various video memberships differ would not be a bad return in itself. Some of those travelers may well sign up one day after they land and get home.

The same idea works on planes, though in-flight WiFi costs more. To avoid paying for air-to-ground data, streaming providers could build small data centers on board that store a few recent hit shows. In May this year, the US low-cost carrier JetBlue offered some Amazon Prime shows for free.

It is not only video. News outlets can do it too. The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal have both tried pushing paid content over WiFi at US airports.

Buying tickets is easy now; changes and refunds are not

With apps such as Qunar, Alitrip and Trip.com Group, linked to a credit card or even an airline loyalty card, it is easy to find a ticket at a good time and a good price. Last year Ryanair, Europe's largest low-cost airline, even began using data analysis to target fare offers at individual customers.

Buying tickets through a mobile app is now very convenient

But when a flight is canceled, rebooking can turn an airport counter into a scrum within minutes. Dealing with the counter never goes smoothly. And if you bought through a platform such as Trip.com Group or Qunar, you also have to wrangle with their customer service, because the fees are often outrageous.

If you were stranded at an airport during the recent heavy rains, you will know exactly what this is like.

It would be nice if the place you bought your ticket could also make rebooking and refunds easier. So far, no company has really managed it. But it can be done. Every major airline already runs its own online check-in. Opening up seat availability for each flight is the most basic first step.

Next, you would probably need a powerful algorithm that weighs flight seats, passengers' rebooking requests, the weather, the odds of departure, the odds of delay and so on. Of course, we all know the hard part of this change is not the technology.

The airport is one big mall

You arrive two hours early and clear security. How do you kill time in an enclosed space? Most people have shopped. But what you can buy at an airport is limited, mostly clothes, suitcases, newspapers and magazines, because you have to be able to carry it. That is starting to change.

The duty-free shop at Singapore Changi Airport

Travel retail is becoming a channel retailers rely on. At major international airports, DFS Group's luxury fashion stores let you shop in store and have the goods delivered to your home. On an ordinary shopping trip that hardly matters, but at an airport it is genuinely useful. Uniqlo already had one store in each of Terminals 1 and 2 at Japan's Narita Airport. In February last year, it opened a store in the Terminal 1 transit area at Singapore's Changi Airport.

In fact, once you can choose in a store and have the goods shipped, there is almost no limit on what can be sold. Airports will surely attract many more kinds of merchants. That is when indoor navigation, which looks rather pointless today, comes into its own. A single floor of Beijing Capital Airport covers 180,000 square meters. Following signs is far too slow.

If you are in a VIP lounge and indoor navigation shows that the shop you want is too far away, you can simply shop over the airport WiFi. And if all you want is a cup of coffee, a server will bring it to you promptly. That is no different from the VIP service at a big department store, only far more attentive than airports are today.

Goodbye junk food: vegetable gardens in the terminal

You have long had enough of airport fast-food restaurants: bad, expensive and unhealthy.

Airports in China's biggest cities already offer a better choice: bad, cheap and unhealthy chain fast-food restaurants. Yes, the very ones you would normally rather avoid.

If you could get fresh, organic, green food at an airport, that restaurant would be packed. In future, more than one restaurant will serve it.

An organic farm inside a terminal

Terminal 3 at Chicago O'Hare International Airport is green, because the airport has built a hydroponic drip-irrigation farm there, growing mainly lettuce and herbs. It is nice to look at, and all that green lifts your mood, but the plants are mainly there to be eaten.

You want to eat more healthily at the airport; restaurants want to make money. Existing airport restaurant brands struggle to stand out by telling travelers, "We use fresh organic vegetables," because anyone can say that. A farm inside the airport shows the food directly, and that gives restaurants a reason to charge more.

Airport WiFi built with phone makers makes the ecosystem look more complete

Airport WiFi has always drawn complaints and never become any easier. One-tap login is a big improvement, but wouldn't automatic connection be more seamless? Many carriers already offer automatic connection for their own mobile data services. You register and activate once, then connect automatically wherever there is a hotspot.

Carriers want to do this but cannot do it well, because they need to identify the user's phone number. A phone does not hand over its number automatically; you have to open a web page or a dedicated app.

The ones who can make it work are phone brands. They could partner with wireless network providers so that the airport network automatically recognizes whether you are using their phone.

Xiaomi, with its fondness for routers, might consider building in-flight WiFi. Every time "auto-connect to airport WiFi" kicks in, it could push a message: "XXX, your Xiaomi phone saved you another 30,000 yuan in data charges today."

Quite possibly, in-flight WiFi would only allow access to the native services phone makers pre-install, and making you watch a five-second ad would be easy. The airport wireless network has become a new gateway to the internet.

Besides farms in the terminal, the control tower disappears

The control tower beside the runway is an airport's landmark. In future, when you take a selfie, there may be nothing behind you but open, flat ground. The air traffic controllers who direct takeoffs and landings from a building a dozen or so stories high have also moved indoors, in front of big screens showing a 360-degree live image.

A 360-degree screen

Each controller covers one section of the view. High-resolution cameras adjust to changes in light and weather, track the flights on screen and keep watch around the clock. By zooming the cameras, controllers can also check the runway for anything unusual.

This is the world's first remote air traffic control center. It went into service in Sweden last year, and Norway will soon have one too.

With no tower in the way, pilots finally get a slightly clearer view.

Smarter means the future airport can be leaner

From check-in to boarding, you may soon do everything on the mobile devices in your hand. These separate entry points break the airport's interior design into fragments. Perhaps in future, unless a designer deliberately goes for something quirky, airports will become flatter and simpler.

So airlines that still bother to install giant smart boarding-pass screens and self-service bag-tag machines could free up that space for a farm or something more interesting. Airports are just too boring.

In-store shopping could be done entirely with projected images. A virtual store costs far less to design than a physical one of several thousand square feet, and the money saved can go into the airport's own logistics and warehousing.

Getting your goods the moment you leave the plane, or finding them already delivered when you get home, is a pleasant surprise that is still hard to pull off.

In-flight shopping: pick up your goods when you land

If the airport is a good opportunity for physical retailers, the plane belongs to e-commerce.

Some airlines have already dropped in-flight sales because the range of goods was too small. But e-commerce has endless shelf space. Besides shipping to your home, it can let you pick up your purchases right at the airport.

Airlines already offer in-flight Wi-Fi, but they all end up charging for it. Since there is so little else to do on a plane, having e-commerce sites pay for you to "go to the mall" would be a good option. Since 2012, Amazon in the US has been trying a partnership with in-flight internet provider Gogo Inflight Internet that lets passengers browse and shop on Amazon's site for free.

Besides shipping to your home, e-commerce sites could also bring the now-popular one-hour delivery to airports, building logistics centers nearby and stocking things you might have forgotten, such as power banks, laptops and tie clips. Their logistics could then make sure your goods are waiting the moment you leave the plane.

No more hoarding receipts and filling in expense reports

As the sharing economy gains acceptance, you no longer have to queue for a taxi after landing; a car you booked is already waiting at the exit. But you cannot expense those rides.

Some business travelers who have not taken to Uber have complained: "People's Uber doesn't give receipts, which puts me in a tough spot." Our accounting systems are not smart enough to go paperless. So you often see business travelers at subway exits asking the service window for a receipt: "Please give me one for 2 yuan."

Worse, once you are back at the office, there is still a pile of expense forms to fill in.

Concur's automated expense process

Concur, an expense-automation software company founded in 1993, has brought both Uber and Airbnb into its system. With TripLink, a third-party plug-in built into Concur, the cost of a home rental or a car ride goes straight into the employee's company travel expense report.

If similar services came to China, business travel would be easier, and companies could hire one or two fewer accountants.

Cover images from smallbiztechnology, futuretravelexperience