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Back to Air Transport IT Review - Issue 3, December 2009

100% BCBP by 2010. Will we get there?

Eric Leopold
BCBP Project Manager, IATA

The move to Bar Coded Boarding Passes (BCBPs) represents the next major transformation for the airline industry following the successful completion of the e-ticketing initiative in 2008.

The IATA Board has mandated that all its member carriers should migrate from magnetic stripe to the 2D bar code standard for boarding passes by end of 2010. The incentive for the industry is to save $1.5 billion a year in costs.

The BCBP project started life in 2004 as one of the original four Simplifying the Business initiatives and was launched to address the three fundamental drawbacks of the magnetic stripe boarding pass - or ATB2, as they are known in the industry.

• First, magnetic stripe versions require reading and printing devices that are much more expensive than bar coding devices.
• Second, magnetic stripes cannot be printed at home so require printers located in the airport, at a desk or inside a kiosk.
• Third, the magnetic stripes boarding passes use an expensive form of paper leading to a high unit cost, while bar codes can be printed onto normal printer paper.

If we look at where we are today then significant progress has already been made. Three new standards have been written and adopted by the industry - the paper BCBP, the mobile BCBP, and most recently, an XML standard for the transfer of BCBPs between airline and airport systems was published. All these were essential to provide global interoperability, which keeps costs down and provides greater convenience for passengers.

We also now have around 200 member airlines that are BCBP capable. That means they can issue the IATA-compliant 2D BCBPs. This was an IATA Board mandate successfully achieved at the end of 2008. However, while airlines now have the capability to issue 2D BCBPs, we now have to get the airports and government security agencies to accept them.

Phase 2

That has moved us into a second phase of the project where we focus on making airports BCBP capable. We will need this if we are to make the 100% target by the end of next year.

There are 2,000 airports used by IATA members around the globe, so this is going to require a huge effort. Today, nearly 1,400 airports are BCBP capable, but that doesn't mean all the airlines that fly from those airports are issuing BCBPs.

For example, only some airports - such as Kuala Lumpur International Airport - have reached what we call the 'platinum' level, which means all IATA airlines using the airport are issuing BCBP to all their passengers. For many airports there is still a way to go to reach that point.

If we look at it from the passenger usage perspective, we are now at the 74% level. That is, 74% of boarding passes issued contain an IATA standard 2D bar code. The target set for this year was 60%, so we have already exceeded that, but it is a global average and we know there are large regional disparities which must be addressed. In particular, North Asia, including China, and the CIS region, which includes Russia, are still well below that average.

So reaching the 100% target by the end of next year is going to be a hard challenge. At the moment the plans in place with the airlines add up to 88% achievement by the target date, with around 70 airlines that will not reach the required level in time. The information we are getting back from these airlines is that there are a number of obstacles hindering their adoption of BCBP.

• Ground handlers: There are some airlines, mainly smaller ones, using ground handlers for check-in, where they cannot be sure when the ground handler will be fully compliant.
• CUTE contracts: Ten airlines are members of CUTE Clubs where the contracts will not be renewed until after 2010, so the replacement cycle for the new equipment required for compliance will not be made available until then.
• No budget: Inevitably in these tight fiscal times, some airlines do not have a budget available for next year to purchase all the new equipment, such as printers and gate readers, to make them 100% compliant.
• No plans: There are around 17 airlines in this category and some of these are still waiting on airports to decide when to cutover to BCBP.

IATA is actively engaging with these airlines to help them meet the target date. But while reaching the 100% is an important milestone, it will not be the end of the story. There are other challenges that need to be addressed.

Two issues

First, promoting adoption of the mobile 2D BCBP. The vision behind this is to encourage paperless travel. The 2D BCBP is sent to the passenger's mobile device, who can then use it by scanning it at airport touch points such as kiosks, bag drop or even for access to airline lounges and at the boarding gate.

A second bigger issue, in part because the industry has less direct control over it, is getting governments to accept home printed and mobile phone BCBPs at airport security checkpoints. Currently, over 20 countries out of the top 40 accept home printed BCBPs. That equates to 234 airports representing 57% of passengers. The figure for countries accepting mobile phone BCBPs is a lot lower, as you would expect, with it being a fairly recent innovation.

Part of the slow adoption is down to some countries requiring extra precautions to be in place before they will accept them. For example, the Transportation Security Administration in the United States requires that the 2D barcode contains a digital signature. So we have developed a standard - published in June 2009 - for these situations, where secured barcodes are needed.

Another example is Singapore. The government required that when the BCBP is scanned at the airport security checkpoint it should be validated against the airline Departure Control System (DCS). To meet this we have written an XML interface between the airport security and airline systems that we call BCBP Exchange. When this is in place, the passenger has the BCBP scanned by airport security and gets a go or no-go decision.

There is also a benefit for the airlines here as well because the airline can be notified of whether the passenger has passed security which helps them determine whether to wait or to start unloading the passenger's baggage if they are late. This should then facilitate on-time departure, which we know from our 2009 Corporate Air Travel Survey is the most important factor in making a journey pleasant.

And really that is the crux of the matter. Making the passenger's journey more convenient and easier has to be at the heart of the BCBP strategy otherwise passengers will not change their behaviour to accept direct delivery and paperless travel of boarding passes. And without that a large part of the benefits of BCBP for airlines will be lost.

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