A new global survey showed that many leading airports in the world wanted to make the primary channel for check-in as a passenger self-service. It can be done with the help of electronic documents. Due to such electronic documents it will be possible to adopt bar-coded boarding passes that can be sent to cell phones. Also it is a good opportunity to get rid of papers that are required to fill in.

It was said at the Airports Council International world conference in Kuala Lumpur that the economic downturn did not influence greatly on IT budgets for airports in 2008. The percentage of IT investments’ revenue dropped from 3.5% in 2007 to 3.2% in 2008.

It is expected that the budget of the world airport IT industry will go up in 2010 while this year it is worth $3 billion.

According to the survey 80% of respondents want to move to the primary means for check-in by 2010. But still some inconveniences may occur such as bottlenecks and queues baggage drop-off and security screening areas.

Fifty two per cent of airports noted that a new system of electronic documents will  influence significantly on IT & telecom systems as well as aircraft maintenance at an airport but at the same time it will prevent the airport staff form paperless work. Nowadays more than 60% of airports have check-in kiosks and by 2012 the number will go up to 90%.

As for such kiosks many airports are planning to enlarge their number for various reasons, i.e. for check-in (44%), new functionality (9%) such as passport scanning (from 32% today to 58% by 2012) and bag-tag printing (from 17% today to 51% by 2012).

There are areas that get the highest interest, such as: common bag-drop locations12%, automated boarding gates 8 %, self-service kiosk for passenger transfer services 11%, and self service kiosk to report lost baggage 5%.