Recently on a trip to Spokane, Wash., to attend a memorial service, I was surprised to find that the counter attendants at Baggage Drop were gone at the Seattle Tacoma International Airport. Instead, Alaska Airlines has you – even senior citizens – lift your bags on to the scale. Then you insert your driver’s license below a scanner and it scans the front side, then the back side of your license.
The next step is having your photo taken, I assume to have a verification that you are the person on your driver’s license. I pressed the Help button and asked the person in charge of Baggage Drop that my photo not be taken because I didn’t know what it was going to be used for and how long it would be stored.
The employee couldn’t answer my questions about the photo, so she got mad and apparently hit an override button so I didn’t have to have my photo taken.
So now, you start a trip. You print out your boarding pass at home or have it sent to your phone. You get to the airport. You print out your baggage tags.
Now, you and computers get your bag on its way to the airplane.
This is all part of a plan to get passengers checked in in less than five minutes.
Alaska has eliminated its check-in kiosks in its new check-in system. Seventy percent of Alaska Airlines’ customers check in online, and it wants to increase that to 90 percent, according to One Mile at a Time, a website that covers reward travel.
After I was finished with this new system and shaking my head, I overheard a family that was having flight problems. A woman asked an Alaska employee if they could buy an airline ticket at the airport.
I think he said no, which is an amazing thing.
