Touchless bag drops set to take off at Dublin Airport

It’s an impressive feat of marketing that enables companies to push more work on to their customers and spin it as a good thing. Take the announcement by Dublin Airport that it is bringing in “touchless” bag drops for some of its airlines.

Travellers can now lug their bags to kiosks, print the tags, wrestle with the sticky bits and send them on their way into the baggage system. It’s all in the name of speeding things up and “improving the customer experience”.

It doesn’t mention the other obvious benefit: less work for airlines. Think about the introduction of the dreaded self-service checkouts in your local supermarkets; there isn’t a need for as many staff to man the desks once they’re in play.

If you’ve flown through a US airport in recent years, you’ll have seen a similar system in action. You tag your bags but still have to drop them off to a man behind a desk. Dublin Airport has had self-service check-in for a while now, but the addition of the bag drop brings it to a new level.

It’s part of a growing shift towards making customers responsible for as much of the process as possible. Some of these new moves, admittedly, benefit travellers. Online check-in, for example, means you don’t have to stand in long queues only to get to the desk to find your flight has closed. Online check-in used to be something you paid extra for with some airlines; now it’s something that travellers come to expect. In the past it has been used as a revenue stream for airlines, with punitive charges – now eliminated – for reprinting forgotten or lost boarding cards at the airport.

But will this “check it yourself” be a step too far for harassed travellers?

Automated passport gates, in some cases, take longer to get through than their human counterparts. And have you seen the bag drop queue in Dublin airport on a busy day? It’s hell. In fact, it was sometimes quicker to go to the regular check-in desk and do the process from scratch. While this may speed things up a little – and Dublin Airport says it is already having an effect – all it takes is a malfunction or two to clog the system up.

Dublin Airport’s new system also checks the bag’s weight, so anyone hoping to wheedle their way out of the excess charges due to the baggage rules will find that avenue firmly closed.

While it’s unlikely that we’ll see a complete end to check-in desks, it’s part of a march towards the automation – and continued dehumanisation – of air travel.