McCarran has also completed Phase 1 of the deployment of its CUSS (Common Use Self-Service) kiosks. These are the self-service equivalents of the CUTE (Common Use Terminal Equipment) systems we told you about last April. They can be used to check into flights and issue boarding passes for any airline at the airport.
Many airports began to look at self-service kiosks last April, when the TSA began requiring passengers to hold an airline-issued boarding pass in their own name to get past security and on to the gates. Airport administrators worried that ticket counters would become overrun with passengers.
In the past, some 30 percent of McCarran passengers, many of them on day trips, didn't stop at a ticket counter. With the new requirement, McCarran now has to process some 15,000 more passengers per day in the ticket-counter area.
Phase 1, which cost about $1.5 million, went live in September with 25 kiosks for 12 airlines, for use only by passengers with no baggage. Those 12 airlines (there are 32 total) represent 85 percent of the traffic at McCarran. Passengers without bags can also check in at any of the six off-site self-service kiosks operating at the Las Vegas Convention Center.
The remaining airlines will join the program at a rate of one or two per month, and Hughes expects them all to offer self-service check-in by 2005. When completed, there will be 200 self-service kiosks on and off site, including in hotels on the Las Vegas strip. The network upgrade will ensure that kiosk queries take less than 60 seconds to fulfill, Hughes says.
Discover the benefits of scalable backbone and network services for application and cloud providers.
Network automation is gaining momentum. Here's how you can drive this powerful technology to its full potential.
Subsea cable alternatives can provide a level of comfort for those concerned about disruptions. Realistically, they will continue to play a small, but critical role in the short term.
