FLYHT's JumpSeat
FLYHT's JumpSeat
The Future of Airports: WestJet and Embross on the Rise of Self-Service
In this insightful episode of the Jump Seat Podcast, host Chris Glass is joined by Liz Baring from Embross and Ryan Potter from WestJet to explore the rapidly evolving world of airport self-service technology.
The conversation delves into WestJet’s innovative self-serve bag drop, the transition from manual check-ins to mobile-first solutions, and how technologies like AI and biometrics are shaping the future of air travel.
With a focus on improving the customer experience and speeding up airport processes, this episode highlights the partnership between WestJet and Embross and their vision for the future of airports. Tune in to learn how these advancements are setting the standard for the industry.
Over the past two years, I've been the host of Flight's Jump Seat and I've had the time of my life telling all of the best aviation stories we could find. We've talked to CEOs, we've talked to pilots and we've talked to people in the aviation industry about this dynamic industry that we all love. But now it's time for something new. I'm going to be moving on to a brand new podcast that we're very excited to bring you, called the Open Skies Podcast. We're still going to continue our mission to tell the best stories that we could find in aviation and the airline industry, so please join us anywhere. You can find your pods on the Open Skies Podcast, or you can follow us on LinkedIn and Instagram. I'll see you on the new channel. Welcome to another edition of the Jump Seat Podcast. I am Chris Glass, product owner here at Flight, and I am with Liz Baring, account manager at Embras, and Ryan Potter, senior manager of IT airports for WestJet.
Ryan Potter:IT airline operations. It airline operations Sorry.
Chris Glass:Welcome to the pod. Thank you, it's good to be here Excellent.
Chris Glass:So this has been in the works for a long time. Ambrose and myself have been talking about potentially bringing you guys on to talk about self-service and bag drop and how that kind of ties into the airline ecosystem. I had the ability to fly out one day on the launch day for Ambrose's new bag drop program at the Calgary airport and I thought what a great idea to bring WestJet and Ambrose's new bag drop program at the Calgary airport and I thought what a great idea to bring WestJet and Ambrose on to talk about that experience and to go from there. So that's why we're here. But before we hop into how your partnership has been, let's get to know you guys.
Liz Baring:So, liz, tell me a little bit about yourself.
Liz Baring:Sure, I've been in the industry. The travel industry started out my career with Northwest Airlines back in the 80s Okay, a little bit before probably you were around.
Chris Glass:No, I was born in 1980.
Liz Baring:Okay, well, this was 1985.
Chris Glass:Do you remember Northwest?
Liz Baring:So I started my career there and made a number of changes, spent 14 years with the airlines and then went to another technology company providing similar hardware technologies back in the early 2000s and just recently joined Ambrose and hopefully will spend my last career days with Ambrose.
Chris Glass:Excellent, well welcome. Thank you, and, ryan, tell me a little bit about yourself.
Ryan Potter:Thanks, Chris. Well, it's good to see you again.
Chris Glass:It's been a long time. Little bit about yourself, thanks, chris.
Ryan Potter:Well, it's good to see you again. Yeah, it's been a long time. So, for people who are listening, obviously Chris and I have known each other from working at the same place for quite some years. Yeah, my journey has also been quite a bit of time. I started at WestJet in the dying days of 1999. And I always like to say that I haven't looked for a job since the 90s. But over the course of time that I've been at WestJet, I've definitely held quite a few roles, mainly in the technology space, looking at airports, although since COVID has been around, I've definitely I've had some changes in that I've led teams related to tech ops, flight ops. I've had some changes in that I've led teams related to tech ops, flight ops, airport mobility, airline mobility, as well as just airline strategy and delivery, which is what I do primarily right now.
Ryan Potter:Yeah, COVID really did kind of force me to take a bunch of titles.
Chris Glass:So, before we jump into the product and the integration, why self-service? I see this move so much in the industry and I have some theories around why it's such a big thing. But I want to hear from our experts why the move to self-serve and how does that benefit the consumer.
Ryan Potter:Footprint is part of it. I always like to tell the story about what WestJet's footprint was at Calgary Airport in 2000 versus now I was working the counter back then so back in the year 2000,.
Ryan Potter:As you would remember, the actual physical space that we occupied is essentially equal to what we occupy today, and the difference, of course, is exponential growth in flights. If you think back then, like 20 flights a day or something that was departing in Calgary airport for WestJet, and now you're in the hundreds of flights a day the physical space of the terminal especially given that there are several major carriers that operate there it could be so limiting too. It's so limiting you cannot expand to process that manually. The other large component of this is to improve the product offering that we do for our guests as well.
Ryan Potter:We don't want your optimal experience to be like it was in 2000, where you got into a large queue and you sat there and waited and, yes, you did get a nice, friendly person like Chris who would have dealt with you on the other end After 45 minutes. After 45 minutes, the idea is all about throughput and there's been a massive evolution in thinking, which I think is what we're going to talk about today as far as the strategy we use at WestJet, because we went from okay, we're going to do self-service at the beginning and sort of replicate the agent experience, but do it using a digital product. As we've moved along, we've changed that so that the actual experience for somebody who uses self-service is different than somebody who is waiting to have full service and, in our estimation, the experience you're going to get is better because it's faster, more accurate, less prone to losing your bag, for example.
Chris Glass:Now WestJet has been an early adopter in self-service and kind of challenged the status quo since day one, with electronic boarding passes, getting rid of your actual flight ticket and even your first self-serve bag drop. Tell me what the early days were like.
Ryan Potter:Okay, well, liz kind of alluded to a company that she'd worked at before. That company was called Kinetics. It was out of Lake Mary, florida, and that's how long Liz and I go back we were. You might recall, at the time WestJet had announced numerous times it was going to operate into the Toronto market and then we didn't. And then we were and then we didn't. But in those early that time period between 2000 and 2002, westjet was seriously contemplating and then eventually launched into Toronto, toronto Airport. That was also going at the same time as a transformation in the industry, like recognizing that proprietary kiosks and things that are out there.
Ryan Potter:Airport authorities didn't want to have 15 kiosks for Northwest, 15 kiosks for Canada, 15 kiosks for WestJet, All different things all different experiences in this and have a common layer of infrastructure, which had already been done from the counter position since the late 80s. So CUTE like the original version of CUTE, the Communist Terminal Equipment was the same thing for counter operations, right so that you could have a single position that could be used by multiple airlines. In our initial days it was we wanted to have a self-service product, like we wanted to have that. You may even remember we kind of quasi had one, an OpenSky's one way back in the day.
Chris Glass:It was called. It was called Touch Go Touch.
Ryan Potter:Go and the reason why I know it was called Touch.
Chris Glass:Go is. My very first job was to stand in front of the Touch Go machines, and the best part about it is they were closer to the Air Canada counter, so I basically directed a lot of people to the computer and they were shaped like airplane tails.
Ryan Potter:Yeah, they were great and the computer like. If you look at the technology inside the computer was essentially a computer that we'd found at Burger King all places.
Ryan Potter:That was then adopted, like the screen wise, in order to process this and run some software on it. But at the time, moving into Toronto, westjet was we wanted to be self-service. We were never going to like if you think of all the carriers that are flying to Terminal 3 at that time space, space, space was a problem. We needed to have self-service technologies. So Kiosk and this is the time period before self-bag drops or even self-tagging was allowed we partnered with Kinetics, where Liz was at the time, on the construction of WestJet's first CUS or common use self-service kiosk application, which we ran for several years and years and years. And then we got into the mid-2000s. It was time for us to make sort of a change and the next step on what we wanted to do functionality-wise, westjet was out for RFP. Unfortunately, kinetics had been purchased by a different company called NCR at the time. They weren't successful in the bid. The bid was successful by IBM at the time and WestJet. We always wanted to control our own destiny. So it's not like we wanted to have IBM write the software for us and continue to maintain that software. What we are looking for is because there are challenges with that CUS or common use self-service operating layer. It's not like you know you're just talking to a Windows driver or something like this. You have to talk to these common use peripheral managers. We needed expertise in that, which is why we had IBM along for the ride. But the intent was they would do the initial build, hand it off to WestJet and WestJet would continue to develop the product internal, and one of the teams that I led did that work as well, which is building on that kiosk application.
Ryan Potter:As we continued on again, the IBM kiosk division, or at least their airport division overall kiosk division, or at least their airport division overall, was sold and purchased by Ambrose. And so at that point, that's where we came full circle back. Liz came eventually back into our world because she had a short or quite a long stint at Sita in between. But even at that time Ambrose wasn't new to us because we were always trying to push some of the boundaries. So you may have remembered we'd done some experimentation with mobile kiosks, right, um, and that's where, like when I first met the people from Ambrose, uh, uh, like it was really just a few guys and all in a family, so my awesome Achilles and from Australia and like miles would take um like the kiosk itself, like it wasn't like they had a full setup for for shows and things like that.
Ryan Potter:He would just attend as an attendee and he would check the kiosk in a golf bag and then he would wheel it, wheel it around the shop like the trade floor, so he'd just come in to the trade show as an attendee and just wheel this thing around, and that is fantastic. And that's how Westcheck got involved with this company called Ambrose, and WestJet was really interested in something it's like to solve some of our challenges, especially like airports like Palm Springs and things like this, where it doesn't have a common use infrastructure but we don't have dedicated counter space for all the time right, so it's not like we can just physically core some kiosks in.
Chris Glass:Sometimes you're at this counter.
Ryan Potter:Sometimes, you're there so these things could move around and you could use them. So we were already in with Embrace. So when Embrace purchased the IBM piece, we were like, okay, well, this is good, but that started our next journey, which is really like that period, that like before COVID. So, if we're looking at like both 2018 through till now, some other major changes going across the landscape, especially in Canada and Europe. But Europe was already essentially there on like two-factor authentication for payments, the deprecation of magnetic stripe reader, payment type forms and the need to either go to a chip and pin or to some other alternate form of payment. The challenge with that, when you look at a common use landscape across the world, is normally what would happen is like if you're, you know, mcdonald's or Subway or whatever company out there and you're going to implement kiosks in your stores and things like this, you use one acquirer. You use your acquirer because you own the places where they are and that's your physical hardware You're not sharing with Burger King.
Liz Baring:You're not sharing with that Right.
Ryan Potter:So that's you've got it right. That's exactly what you're seeing here, which is now you have a kiosk that's shared by Air Canada, westjet, british Airways, klm, air France, everybody Right. Whose whose payment provider because you can't use multiple acquirers on these things is going to be used. So it would come down to the airport authority itself, would have to choose the acquirer and then you'd have to integrate to the acquirer. When we looked at it across our root network, we were going to have to integrate to probably between 15 and 20 different acquirers globally for us to continue to process payment on a kiosk. We did one, and that first one took us 18 months to get across the line, and that wasn't because of low prioritization in WestJet or anything like that.
Ryan Potter:It's just, especially when it comes to financial things, it is rigid and the time frame can go quite long. So WestJet was really forced into making a choice. Do we want to invest all the time and the money on that and possibly not even meet the deadlines for some things and have to turn kiosks off in some airports, or do we actually start doing a fundamental shift in how we process guests in an airport? Yeah, there was some, you know, apprehension on the side of, like some groups inside of WestJet at the time, worried about loss of ancillary sales or things like this. Like if you removed payment from a kiosk which was the strategy we were proposing, yeah, and move that payment upstream so you move it into the digital product. So if you're the digital check-in and the mobile app that WestJet has, that should be the place where people go to and where the guests go to in order to process anything. It's also the place where you can process payment and as long as the payment's done on those back-end pieces, then the kiosk itself no longer needs to do this. There's multiple benefits to that. You don't have to integrate to any of these acquirers. It removes that fiscal hardware from PCI scope, which is for those who don't know what that is, that's payment card industry standards stuff that you have to get certified every year on. It removes that stuff from scope. But the other added benefit is those transactions take time and when you look at an airport, you can't just take a kiosk farm and continually expand it and expand it and expand it and expand it and expand it, because it's taking you a minute and a half or six minutes or however long it's going to average take you when you're going through multiple transactions. You know assessing fees for baggage or for seats or for things like this. If the person actually already comes, already ready, all you need to do is either spit out a tag If they're on an international itinerary, perhaps if they haven't used, and good plug for the regular. You know document verification stuff in the WestJet mobile app. If you use that, you don't even have to then have to scan your passports at a kiosk or anything like that.
Ryan Potter:But really the kiosk itself then just becomes a tagging platform and actually moves itself into part of the bag drop infrastructure, like at west jet. We no longer think of that as a check-in kiosk. What we think of that is is our it's part of our bag drop experience. Instead of having a one-step bag drop, which is you have a bag drop machine and I process everything on that machine like that's where I could do check-in or issue bags or collect payments and things like this we have a what I like to call 1.5 step, like where the kiosk that's fronting it, because the kiosks are slimmer and and and over time like especially if you're not doing a lot of full service stuff on them you can start making those kiosks smaller and smaller and smaller.
Ryan Potter:But you can put an army of those to get the tags.
Ryan Potter:Like it's essentially they just print the tags and then you move to the bag drop. Right, because if you do it at the bag drop and some of our studies that we looked at on this, um, the throughput then you end up with a choke point there, right? So, um, if, if we just said, okay, well, we'll issue the bag at the bag drop, the, by the time you get up to the bag drop there's only 12 to 15 units that sit there in Calgary Airport, yeah, you'll end up with just clogs of people, whereas you can put more kiosks. So our strategy evolved to we wanted it to be to essentially replicate what agents did for our guests to what we'd like you. What we want you to do is use the mobile application as the primary way that you interact with WestJet, and then we use the kiosks and the backdrops in order to facilitate a faster experience for you in the airport, and that was a big difference from the last time I used self-service, because I famously do not want to see anybody at the counter.
Ryan Potter:I want to get through. I have a.
Chris Glass:Nexus card so I go right through the security checkpoint as fast as possible. You know, that's kind of my mind frame. The biggest difference was using my mobile app instead of actually using the kiosk and the kiosk kicking me back to that, that seemed to be like the big change. And I quite enjoyed it. The only issue would be you're worried about connectivity in the airport, I would assume now.
Ryan Potter:You definitely are Not so much today anymore as it used to be Definitely not because of the, especially if you're in a major airport in Canada, the United States or in Europe, you're going to have coverage. You're going to have coverage. Mobile coverage isn't spotty like it used to be. That becomes more of an issue in some places like the Caribbean, latin America and things like this. And even if there isn't a mobile network, that's available, like the Wi-Fi networks in some of those airports, can be spotty.
Chris Glass:That's a challenge we see with some of our products is some of our clients are flying to countries or destinations that don't have connectivity, so that's why we've invested in the hardware. So, when you have a company like WestJet as a partner, are they unique? Are the challenges unique? Are you building a custom company like WestJet as a partner? Are they unique? Are the challenges unique? Are you building a custom solution for WestJet or is this something you're seeing across the industry and WestJet's just ahead of the curve?
Liz Baring:So good question. But before I get into answering your question, I just wanted to go back to Ryan. Ryan, and I think the underlying the common denominator here is that the consumer is very early on. In the early stages of self-service, the consumer wasn't as willing to adopt the self-service. They didn't like the fact that they were having to do the work themselves right, and so that's kind of where the transition and the transgression progressed over the years. It took a little bit longer because you had to start getting people used to the fact that they didn't have a ticket, that it was an electronic ticket that they could actually physically check in without a person and get the documents that they needed. So fast forward.
Liz Baring:And to answer your question, I think WestJet has been an innovator and a leader in this space. I think a lot of people look to WestJet to see what they're doing. They've definitely, I think, been the leader in a lot of the self-service, especially with self-bag drop. So I've got customers in the US as well and we always use WestJet as an example saying, hey, you want to see how self-bag drop works.
Ryan Potter:Come on, let's come to.
Liz Baring:Calgary. We'll show you how it works. We'll show you how simple it is. We'll show you that there aren't the lines that we see in the US, Because they're almost. It's to the point where they're mandating that that's how the passenger checks in. They don't give them an option anymore to check in at the airport.
Ryan Potter:It is, and that is, a struggle for a company to overcome, especially one like WestJet, where it's very people-focused Like, if you consider probably the first, at least the first 20 years of our company it would be. The strength is the people, right. So there's an institutional reluctance and resistance to removing a guest interaction from our people right, Right.
Ryan Potter:A touch point as, instead of saying, well, actually it's better, because even if, like the people like you and me, who I don't want to see anyone, I just want to use the machines and we get what we need, but the vast majority of people move through without any issue at all, that allows infinitely more time for the agents to be able to deal with those that actually do have some challenges, because it's not 100% of everybody is eligible. There are conditions, of course, that we have to restrict people's usage. It opens up time for those people to do it. Rather than before, we would have said everybody deserves and should get a good experience with a WestJet customer service agent.
Ryan Potter:That's our strength, that's our brand and that wasn't wrong, but you still had a positive experience but it isn't scalable, but it also isn't a hundred percent right, because there are people like us and others who like even though I have a great experience with the WestJet agent after waiting for 30 minutes, I didn't want to wait for 30 minutes and I might not have had the time Right and I think, going back to your other question that you asked if we customize our solution and really the answer is no what we do is we start with a core application and we build it so that it's modular and flexible.
Liz Baring:So if WestJet wants to use that core infrastructure and build out their self-service program whether it's a self-service backdrop, whether it's access to the lounge- yeah, like the client, for the applications that we use for lounge access, for backdrop and for kiosk is actually the same client.
Ryan Potter:It's something that's called TUS AppLink, which is an MBROS product. That's actually what's bought and licensed and sits there on each of these type of platforms and it controls the interface with the peripheral error and the operating systems and then launches a Chrome browser where the application actually then runs in. But you can have different applications in that and there is some like compared to what we used to, like WestJet used to be the. We are so unique, like there's the way everybody else does it. Now there's the way WestJet does it and, as I'm sure you recall, that laugh was coming from trauma, that's right. So it became very complicated, like if you went back to the mid-2000s and really into the early 2010s. That was a real struggle for us, because as a company, we're like no, we want to do these billion things inside the application, but that's not what the application is designed to do out of the box, so we end up customizing. Then you get caught in update cycles and things like this, because software ages.
Liz Baring:We all know that.
Ryan Potter:And software needs to be updated and patched and revised and things like this, and if you're not on a standard software like the vendor that you're working with, it isn't gonna provide it to you. You're gonna have to engage back with them and initiate a cost on your own in order to get that updated. I'd say in the early days, yes, we were heavily customised, especially even when we were on NCR slash.
Ryan Potter:Kinetic stuff. It was heavily customised. As time has gone on, year after year after year, that has disappeared from WestJet and definitely from our strategy and philosophy perspective, at least on the technology side and digital sides. Now is to move to out of box right, like that is the only way we go to a software company that makes software and that's it, or software company and we're seeing more of the airlines who, back to west jet's point, they wanted to customize everything.
Liz Baring:everything needed to be customized. Today they're like how can we customize this as little as possible? We don't have the resources to support these applications anymore, but we need to find a way to differentiate ourselves. So there might be some branding differentiators, but for the most part, if you look and you open the kimono, if you will, this stuff is the same as a core.
Ryan Potter:Yes, if you look at ours for those applications, the core of our application, for example, is the same as Delta's or whoever else's. There's some scanning and stuff. That. That's there, the differentiator for airlines now, and it goes back to like our earlier discussion on moving application functionality into the mobile app. That's where you control your differentiator right so you can do whatever you want and everybody's mobile app to airline to airline is completely different. They all have some key things that are in them, but that's where you feel the same, that would feel the same but they.
Ryan Potter:But you can control whatever you want to do from a unique experience there, where you actually control the development teams. You're not using, you know, a bespoke technology platform which is like processing in airports whether that's comedy, self-service or or acute systems or things. This that is highly bespoke to the airline industry. It's not like you can go off the street and try to find a developer who understands this stuff. It takes years to bring somebody up to speed on that. So control it in the mobile app, where that's just standard stuff that we do in technology organizations. And then what you're finding as time goes on and Liz was correct like areas of the world are at different stages of this evolution. Like the European, like Asia is ahead, usually the same as Europeans, and sometimes even slightly ahead, because they'll do some unique things.
Ryan Potter:Europe is usually the gold standard on what is happening when it comes to self-service. Canada is usually three to four years behind when it comes to regulatory and adoption and the type of technologies you're seeing, and the United States is about a decade behind Europe. And it's not because of lack of that. The United States is the trauma from 9-11 and what that did to the security landscape. Anybody who works in aviation knows like once the government puts in a rule, it's very, very difficult to get the government, regardless of how ridiculous the rule is. Now it's very hard for the government to remove the rule, and in the United States you had that Like there was so much concern in the wake of 9-11, which justified at the time because not like every airport had hold bag screening or anything like that at the time.
Chris Glass:No, the facilities just weren't there back then.
Ryan Potter:They just weren't there, but they are now. They were within like two years of 9-11. Yeah, quite quick, but the rules were never revisited, right? So then it became a lot more problematic.
Ryan Potter:So, in the United States now you find carriers like if you look at Alaska or American or Delta or Spirit or any of these carriers, their journey right now where they are on bag drops or kiosk and what they want to do as far as their self-service model more reflects about Canada about 10 years ago, but for us it works out Like at WestJet.
Ryan Potter:I do speak to Ambrose's customers some other customers, mainly the American ones, who are interested in this, like as Liz was alluding to, when Ambrose brings them up here I'm happy to showcase you know what we've done and you know if some of those other carriers can learn from some of our missteps and just take a look at the data that we've done, it may help them. Like Alaska, I know, was very excited, like when we they wanted to go down the same route of removing ancillary sales collection from kiosk, for example, as westship. But they're like I don't know how I'm going to do this. Like there's no way I'm going to be able to sell this to the executive at alaska and then coming if alaska's having trouble.
Chris Glass:That how can a spirit? Or? Exactly right. It must be even harder for those, uh, ultra low cost airlines where their bread and butter is that airport charges, that airport ancillary revenue. So they must be even more nervous.
Ryan Potter:They are because some of those models they work on differential pricing, whether or not you're purchasing in advance of coming to an airport versus coming to an airport. So you can continue to do stuff at airports. You're just going to have to accept that you're going to have heavy PCI regulations around what you do. Certifications You're going to have to move your applications to chip and pin or other forms of payment so you can continue to do that, or you can make the investment and move that to your mobile app. But when you're doing that, like if you're a Spirit or even if you're a Flare or something like this, where you use that type of model with differential pricing, you may have to just rethink that. When it comes to it, like maybe just have it as a time trigger, you can still do it, just always push your payments to the application, but make it as a time triggered piece.
Chris Glass:Interesting. So here at Flight, when we introduce a client to a new product, it's super important that our launches go seamlessly right, we're putting hardware on aircraft and then turning it on and getting all the regulatory stuff. What is it like, liz, from your perspective, when you're launching a new product? What do you take into account? And specifically thinking the bag drop launch in? Calgary what went into that project on your end.
Liz Baring:Well, and I'll let Ryan talk to a lot of it because it was before my time with M-Ross, but I think number one it's the demand, right, it's the demand, it's the. As we were talking earlier, I think COVID played a big part in needing to have a hands-off approach to checking in, to being able to be a lot more self-service and providing a lot more self-service technology than we had before. So, number one, just listening to the industry, what are the customers looking for? What are the airline, what are our airline customers looking for? And so you know, a lot of it just is collaboration, talking to the customer, working things out together.
Ryan Potter:and so, yeah, there was a lot of preparation though for this one, like, obviously, calgary is the flagship for right, it's flagship Calgary for for WestJet right and the. Given the size of our operation at that airport, it's not something you want to introduce large amounts of change without thorough preparation airport. It's not something you want to introduce large amounts of change without thorough preparation, because it can have an outsized impact on the WestJet operation overall. In this case. Here I would say you know mocks, mocks, mocks.
Ryan Potter:Like the amount of times that we ran software in parallel with this, which is difficult because both reusing different ways of updating the backend baggage systems and things like that.
Ryan Potter:But we solved some of those challenges and then it was over time.
Ryan Potter:We'd be like we'd use one unit and we'd use two units. We'd work out the kinks on what was the difference, or the Delta that was, between what we expected the application to, to how to expect how it was going to perform, versus what we were actually seeing with real world data and the ability to control, like the volume knob on how many you were doing. So you weren't being drowned out by the change factor, cause that's always when you're releasing major software changes and things like that, there's always going to be a whole segment of the people who just don't want to change at all and they will use every, every means to complain. Just you know, even just changing the color from teal to blue, and so in this one here, you're able to control the volume level of those that can be critically complaining about it. So if you're thinking about you know, if you're in an airport and it's new and I haven't used it before I may say something to an agent. You know, I just preferred it the way it was, I just knew what I was doing.
Ryan Potter:Things like that Agents pick up on that and then you end up with a large volume that comes from the airport suggesting that maybe it's, maybe there's problems with the software or something like that. It's very important to control that messaging when you're doing major software releases. But for us it was like a close partnership with you know, westjet, the Calgary Airport Authority, embraer, but also our organized labor partners at Unifor as well. Right, like so. This was done like when we were releasing the self-bag drop and changing the self-bag drop software out, like that was done in full concert with them as well.
Chris Glass:Like they were along for the journey. They were a complete partner in the journey. One question that kind of keeps popping up in my head is like I've seen the evolution up until now and it's so hard to predict where it's going. But with technology moving so fast, what's next? What's the next generation of self-service at an airport?
Liz Baring:So, from a technology perspective and a provider perspective, the next is AI, and of course, ai is big for everybody, right? And so what we're working on right now is for us to build up our AI infrastructure, that information that we have, so that self-service. What's going to happen next is it's intuitively going to know if I place my bag on the self-bag drop belt. It's going to weigh it, it's going to recognize the size of it, it's going to look at the dimensions. It's going to know if I place my bag on the self-bag drop belt. It's going to weigh it, it's going to recognize the size of it, it's going to look at the dimensions, it's going to look if the tag is in the right spot, and then so on and so forth. So AI is going to play a big, big factor in the self-service, especially with self-bag drop.
Chris Glass:Right, and I'm assuming you're investing heavily in that.
Liz Baring:We are, we are.
Chris Glass:And how do you think that's going to affect the experience Like practically having all that kind of data? It'll improve it.
Ryan Potter:It will improve it. And speed things up for sure and speed things up, Like if you look, if you went to Calgary Airport on any given day right now and just sat outside a bag drop for two or three hours and watched people, I'm done.
Ryan Potter:So am I. When you watch it, you'll see some people who struggle right, especially like if your tag is outside of a readable zone or something like that, and it's hanging off the back and it's telling the person to move the bag, and they move it, but they're not really certain exactly where they need to do this, like the AI pieces on that will, rather than having to just write a series of rules that it's like okay, this sensor says x, so therefore I have to do y or or. I suggest to the guests that I do y. This one would be much more accurate. On on providing real world advice, like I'm, I'm excited by that.
Ryan Potter:I where the if you're going to look at overall in the world, like the biggest challenge in the next year and a half, that WestJet is ahead of the curve because we've already removed payment from the kiosks is especially in the Canadian market as well, like right now, you'll start to see that removal Like these, if you're using, if you're another air carrier that's out there in Canada and you're using old old school magnetic stripe payment type things, you, you, you probably have a project underway in order to remove that and that is going to transform things in North, in North America, over the next few years. When you look at Europe, they're already there, right, that's already been done and that's already been removed.
Chris Glass:When it comes to they didn't really have a choice. In Europe, there's just too many people.
Ryan Potter:Well, it's also. Their financial restrictions on the use of older technologies is more rigid. Canada is middle of the road and the United States is, you know, more of a free-for-all on what you want to do. But the it's a home of freedom, what you want to do, but the uh, it's a home of freedom. But the uh, uh. But it's uh like when I, when I look at self-service technologies in an airport. What needs to change and I agree with AI is it, but it's disruption management, like if you look at.
Ryan Potter:If you look at anything that happens with airlines now, most people have a good experience with an airline on a good day.
Chris Glass:Yeah, like it's like I get from A to B. Hey, you're going somewhere. Fun, everything goes smooth, it's you're happy.
Ryan Potter:It's disruption that is that seem. It seems worse than it did before COVID, like they just anecdotally when, when you look at it, um, um, large scale storms or you know, or groundings due to strikes or other things like this, or the lovely hail that we just had here, or just the amazing hail that we had in Calgary.
Ryan Potter:Hopefully that doesn't happen again. Those type of things. It creates a massive impact and you just can't keep up with it. It's not like you can staff a call center to deal with the volumes that you deal with when your entire airline is shut down day to day.
Ryan Potter:right, you can't plan for IROPS you cannot plan for things and it used to be, and maybe this is you know, climate is definitely shifting. The volume of actual major level events like that it's higher than it was before. We used to probably hit that once every few years before. We used to probably hit that once every few years before, and it's like now it'll be once or twice a year.
Ryan Potter:We have something that happens that catastrophically affects our network, right, right, and that's where the struggle is, and it's not just WestJet. I think it's the same problem in Canada, the same problem in almost every area on the planet is how do we respond to that and how can we ramp those things up, like AI and applications that can that are using AI in order in order to search for things like alternate flight arrangements and things like this, and actually doing the work of getting these people booked as fast as possible onto something, cause it's not like especially like if you look at the hailstorm anybody who's here in Calgary that day you're like you didn't expect WestJet to get you anywhere anywhere no no, you knew full well, but the person in Winnipeg has no idea what's happening.
Ryan Potter:But you also wanted communication on what WestJet was going to do for you, and that's where you know the communication gets there. It just takes a little bit of time. That's where AI and technology has the ability to transform that.
Chris Glass:Right and really make that experience so much better to transform that Right and really make that experience so much better. Yeah, I think that's kind of the biggest challenge is those irregular operations. When you move everything to self-serve. It's tough when you need those custom solutions.
Liz Baring:Right, yes, I think too, chris, the other thing that I didn't mention. So AI is one, I think. Biometrics and digitalization is another, which I saw more in the States than I've ever seen in. Canada.
Ryan Potter:So it seems like they're further ahead.
Chris Glass:It didn't work in the States. The ones I saw very well they don't.
Liz Baring:They haven't adopted. They have it. They have biometrics but for whatever reason, they're not using it as readily as they should. But digital ID, which is interesting at the tsa checkpoint, as ryan mentioned earlier, part of the reason why we're so stuck is because of the regulatory um, the tsa transportation security agency, as well as um for international um, cbp, um. But what?
Liz Baring:What we're finding is that tsa has adopted digitalization in some of the airports. They're kind of using it as a testbed in Detroit with Delta, and that is, the lines go much faster. So passengers are saying, hey, wait a minute, I don't have to stand in this line for 30, 45 minutes, I'm going to miss my flight. But hey, if I opt in and they have to opt in for a digital identification, which means they just check your ID, your face, against their ID database, then hey, I can get through this line immediately. And so we're finally seeing it picking up and passengers more readily accepting a biometric or a face type of verification process and from a regulatory perspective that's finally starting to get some acceptance from Transport Canada as well.
Chris Glass:Like that's been the reason for slow to non-existent adoption of biometric technologies in Canada, which is so funny because Nexus has been around for so long and from a traveler point of view, that is the most seamless thing going. And then you hit a bottleneck before and a bottleneck after and you're like why isn't this all?
Ryan Potter:It should be seamless, right?
Chris Glass:You have all of my information in my eye every time I scan it right.
Ryan Potter:We do and there is some movement now. There are some trials underway. Air Canada is doing some trials in multiple airports right now with some biometric reporting. Westjet had done some before as well. We were the first airline in Canada to do a large-scale biometric reporting trial and for us that was like. Our main intent was to overcome some of those regulatory. What we wanted to do was get Transport Canada to look at and say and to prove like using biometrics to validate somebody's identification is equal to or greater than from improved security versus using a manual document. And that was that. That's the good part about that is like I'm glad that we did that trial, even though what you know westchester doesn't gloss it over it doesn't, it's either, it's either you yes, yeah, it's all ones and zeros, but it's allowed those other trials to continue as well and you know WestJet.
Ryan Potter:We have a few other priorities on acquisitions of airlines and things like this that were underway, so we're not participating in the current transport trials related to biometrics Following them closely. Following them closely, because that is is something, given transport's opening on this, is something that's going to come in canadian airports?
Chris Glass:yeah, absolutely yeah, that's one of the one of the products we have here is a turn management solution that connects to the aircraft and connects to the operating system in in bross's case. How closely do you work with reservation systems, or is that more the airline that brings it to you?
Liz Baring:Or are you integrated with Sabre, Amadeus, that kind of thing? So we do integrate all of our technologies into all of the back-end systems, the DCS, the departure control systems, whether it's Amadeus, whether it's Sabre, whatever it might be. And we do have a small application that we can host. If, for example, you've got a charter airline or an airline that doesn't have their own DCS departure control system, we have one that we can provide as well.
Ryan Potter:Yeah, like for WestJet, it's a little bit different. We don't like. Our strategy on this is to make the consuming applications, like the front applications that are out there, as dumb as possible. So no business logic, no rules, no, nothing inside of those With WestJet's implementation of the kiosk and bag drop software like Ambrose doesn't go to Sabre directly. They come to WestJet series of APIs. So we have APIs that are exposed for airport operations and related to both passenger check-in baggage issue as well as bag drop and lounge entry and things like that, and that's where Ambrose comes in. But Ambrose definitely from a product perspective. They are integrated with any of the major If you want to go down that route. For WestJet it's a little bit different.
Chris Glass:Size-wise it's a little bit different.
Ryan Potter:I get what you're saying If you're a smaller competitor.
Chris Glass:You don't have Orion, you, you don't have Orion. Exactly Orion's department, right?
Liz Baring:So we do have an application that airlines who don't have one can use, so yeah, Excellent, and a couple last questions for you.
Chris Glass:How many airports are we operating in for Ambrose and West End at the same time?
Ryan Potter:That's well, it depends, right, Well it is definitely across Canada, but if we're talking software versus hardware, so Ambrose offers both hardware and software solutions. Westjet, our proprietary kiosk, which is really just Abbotsford, is both the only airport that we actually have proprietary hardware anymore.
Chris Glass:Shout out to Parm Yep. It's been a frequent podcast guest. If you're listening, one of the forefront to Parm Yep, it's been a frequent podcast guest, if you're listening, one of the forefronts of airports Yep.
Ryan Potter:So we have Embross hardware that sits at that airport. The rest of our airports we use common use type technologies, so the kiosks themselves, hardware-wise, it's a mix. There are airports we fly to that have Embrose, some that have CETA hardware, some that have maternal hardware, everything under the sun. Now, when it comes to application side, westjet exclusively uses Ambrose applications for South Bag Drop, the tagging, what we call Fast Tag, which is the kiosk tagging application, and for lounge entry. So a number of airports where, like, if we look at kiosks and bag drops that are currently, yeah, like it's probably about 20, 20 or so airports that WestJet currently operates that software at, and anywhere where it's large, like, if there's an ability to do it, then we do.
Ryan Potter:But the other thing that has to happen which is different than kiosks in the old days is like when you have bag drops and things like this, you need a baggage handling system and a baggage reconciliation system in order to make that work. We don't do, because our kiosk application no longer does full service check-in. We don't just plop a kiosk in random airport anymore because you need a bag drop, because you can't check in on the kiosk. All it does is give you a tag to go to a bag drop. So the amount of airports where we put our software onto a CommonEase kiosk is smaller than it used to be, because we only do that if there's a self-bag drop in the airport.
Liz Baring:And in terms of our footprint, I mean we're a global provider. Yeah, it's huge. And when you hear of an airport using common use, you can pretty much assure that Ambrose has at least the hardware perspective in there the check-in kiosks, the common use, the cute positions that the agents use themselves, use themselves. When it comes to other technology and service providers that are out there, they could be a competitor of ours, but they don't necessarily manufacture their own hardware and we've got a fabulous manufacturing facility just outside of Toronto, so we have other providers selling our hardware as part of their offer.
Ryan Potter:It is, it's an amazing journey, when you think they've gone from just pushing a kiosk around a trade floor to being the largest provider of kiosks in the planet.
Chris Glass:Well, when you have a good product, good things happen. One of our huge goals here with the pod is to tell stories that our listeners might not hear, so this has been a fantastic conversation about self-serve, so I'd like to thank you both for coming to spend some time with me today, and I look forward to touching base with you in a year and seeing where the future of self-service is.
Liz Baring:Absolutely.
Chris Glass:Thank you Excellent.
Ryan Potter:Thanks, Chris.
Chris Glass:Thanks, Chris. Thank you once again for listening to the Jump Seat Podcast. We'll be back with some great episodes in the next few weeks.
