Friday, August 11, 2006

ARINC Installing 126 Passenger-Service Kiosks at Narita airport

This little new blurb tells us that ARINC, a global transportation communications and systems engineering company, is working with a number of airlines in the Star Alliance program to install universal check-in kiosks, starting with 126 of them in Tokyo's Narita new Terminal 1 South Wing, which serves All Nippon Airways, United Airlines, Air Canada, Austrian Airlines, and other Alliance members.

ARINC says that this is, "the largest single installation of CUSS (common-use self-service) check-in kiosks at any terminal in the Asia-Pacific region... [and ] is also the first installation of ARINC's next generation of its SelfServ CUSS kiosk technology, which uses a flexible new all-Java software platform."

Common use airline ticketing systems seem like a really good idea, since the functionality is virtually identical between airlines. Granted, I do think there's some branding potential that may be lost (and I'm especially thinking of the super-cute Jet Blue kiosks scattered about terminal 5 at JFK), but in this case it would seem that the benefits greatly outweigh the potential costs there.

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