Automation Of Processes A.D. 2011

My trip to the 2011 CES last week was both fruitful and fun, despite the fact it started with some complications "due to the operational reasons". The quoted sentence is from Lufthansa, the airline I fly very often, because they offer potentially very good connections, especially across the Atlantic. I say potentially, because my statistics of spending hours and sometimes even nights at airports "due to the operational reasons" are alarmingly high.

Lufthansa is quite efficient with their mobile strategy. They have been sending alert SMS messages for years and most of their standard processes (including a check-in) can be done from a mobile phone, using a web browser. But unfortunately when something goes wrong, it turns out a mobile phone does not help much. On Thursday, January 6th, I started getting messages like "we are sorry but your flight from Krakow to Munich id delayed". Fine, thank you for keeping me updated. But unfortunately I had no idea, whether my next flight I connect to would be on time, making travel planning even more difficult. Finally my first plane was late 3 hours and the second one left on time, so I missed it and had to spend a lovely night in Munich instead of Las Vegas.

Had to find a reroute. There is no "APP" for that. So to the queue to the transfer desk. It was not 7 hours long, as eleven months ago. Only ten, may be fifteen people before me. Five agents. And it still took me 90 minutes to get to the transfer desk and another 40 to complete, what seemed to be a really well defined task. What 90% of passengers who miss their flights would like to get? The nearest flight to their destination, right? But even the transfer agents do not have an "APP" for that... They have to manually find an alternative routing and rebook the tickets. A task that should have been done by computers in its entirety. A list of potential options, sorted by criteria like number of stops or total travel time or arrival time. A single click should initiate the rerouting and the entire operation should take no more than five minutes. And when a process like that was implemented in the back office system, it would be very easy to expose it via a web link and 90% of the 90% would complete the rerouting without any agent assistance, from their mobile phones. Unbelievable they still do not have this automated. It is 2011, isn't it?

One other process still handled manually is a hotel check-in. I book all of my stays via the Internet. I enter all my details into the web forms. I state my room preferences. I supply my credit card details. Then I arrive at the hotel and they ask me to fill a paper form with my name, address, date of birth and so on... Then they ask form my credit card... And finally I get the key to the room.

OK I do not expect walking straight to the room and opening it using my mobile phone... yet... But the credit card I provided at the time of booking should be able to open the door. There is a magnetic strip reader in the door after all. No. You have to go to the reception.

But there is a light in the tunnel. Hyatt in Orlando has recently surprised me. 24 hours before the arrival they offered me a web check in. I did it from my phone and got a message with a magic barcode in return. The barcode was supposed to be shown to a machine in the lobby, which would dispense a key to the room. Great! Except it did not work.

So they do all this web and mobile check in and send the barcodes to mobile phones and then try to read the barcodes from the phone's screen using LASER scanners. Hint: it will never work. Laser can read paper but never an LCD display. Hint: use CCD or CMOS sensors with image recognition. A simple phone camera sensor ($5 a piece?) will work. By the way. Airlines try the exactly same approach. Reading phone screens using laser scanners. Such scanners cannot even read the Amazon Kindle screen, which has the highest contrast in the world and is absolutely no glare. Yeah... yeah... yeah... somebody has to put it all together. The opportunity is calling!