Martin Thomas is part of the product and services team at British Airways. His mission: to speed up, enhance and personalise the airport experience. When The Club caught up with Martin he told us that ‘2014 could be a breakthrough year’

Which projects are you currently working on to improve customer experiences?

While the aircraft we fly are state-of-the-art, many of the airport processes haven’t changed in years. A lot of the projects that I’m involved with are about updating them, particularly boarding passes and luggage bag tags. Now that we offer online boarding passes on mobile devices, a growing number of customers – currently around 15 per cent – are using them. The way customers are interacting with technology is becoming an integral part of their everyday lives and gives us opportunities to start personalising the experience in what is traditionally a very generic airport environment.

Are many customers using the self-service check-in facilities at airports?

Around half of our customers turn up with nothing done prior to arriving at the airport. The other 50 per cent go online to check-in, make their seat choice, and print off a boarding pass. Within that group, you’ve a growing proportion of customers who do this on their mobile devices – it’s about leveraging that. To cater for them, the ba.com team added the Passbook functionality for iPhones, making mobile boarding passes more accessible, rather than passengers having to navigate there via the BA app. It’s quicker and slicker.

And how have bag tags been updated?

We have a cross-directorate team developing and trialling a digital bag tag. It’s a permanent tag with an ‘E Ink’ display – similar to that found on Kindles. The barcode and destination information of the bag can be updated using a version of the BA mobile app on a phone equipped with NFC (near-field communication), as used by Oyster cards on London Underground. At the moment, if I check in on my mobile device, when I get to the airport with my suitcase, I need to go to a desk or kiosk to get my tag, then to another desk to drop my bag. It’s a two-step process. The digital bag tag aims to remove one of those steps: by pressing a button on my phone and having it near my bag, the tag is updated in a few seconds.

How well does it work in reality?

Very well. And unlike the systems that some airlines are trying, this doesn’t require airports to change their infrastructure fundamentally. We carried out a number of trials, including some using frequent flyers from Microsoft. That was great because we had an audience already very receptive to new technology that was actively involved with us in developing the dedicated version of the mobile BA app.

What’s the next step?

The team is currently working on the final design of the bag tag. The prototype is robust; we now need to make it an appealing object for our customers and globally accessible. When it’s released next year, it will come with Apple iOS compatibility, as iPhones don’t support NFC. 

And what are you working on beyond the bag tag?

We are working on an array of projects, many of which use will use data that customers opt in to give us. We are looking at how we can make the best use of that information to create a great customer service experience.

Click here to find out more about downloading the ba.com mobile app. The new digital bag tags will be available later in 2014

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This article has been tagged BA, Technology