Skip The Counter

Finally electronic check-ins are making it to incumbent categories. Airlines did that a long time ago with electronic boarding passes and kiosks. Hotels have been slow and overtaken by independent services like AirBnB. It has been surprising though, as typically when booking a room guests provide all the details - names, addresses and credit cards. But hotels (with some exceptions) still require IDs, credit cards and paper forms at check-in.

Rental cars have been the most annoying. Yes I know many of them have skip-the-counter for corporate customers, but regulars, and especially foreigners, still must line up and deal with agents. The worst part of car rental procedure is signing all their legal disclaimers and agreements. They are many pages long (with an ultra small font) and to make things worse, they display them now on post-stamp-sized screens at check-in counters. So in fact nobody knows what they are agreeing to. It is impossible to read all that text.

Personally I don't bother reading what I sign, relying on the fact somebody does that, and if there was a significant deviation from the universally accepted rules, there would be noise about this in the media. But still this practice is totally unfair.

On the positive side, what has surprised me recently was the experience with SIXT. They advertise their "skip-the-counter" option even when booking via brokers like Expedia. I did not pay much faith into that but have been positively surprised. Also from the technology standpoint. 

After making a booking, I received a skip-the-counter link via email. The link opened in a web browser on my phone. It guided me through scanning my driver license (using the phone camera, all within the browser) and then taking a selfie (it even told me to remove glasses, all within the browser). I was surprised all that could technically been done in a browser, especially on a phone as old as mine. But it all worked flawlessly. Then it advised me I would be receiving another link ahead of the pickup time to select a vehicle (this makes sense, as 2 hours before the pickup they will know what vehicles they have on site).