TRAVEL INSIDER
A Las Vegas landing strip for innovative, high-tech ideas
Those in charge of McCarran International Airport are quick to warm to gizmos that make traveling easier.
If you're looking for innovative airport services, it's a sure bet you'll find them in Las Vegas. And I'm not talking about on-site slot machines.
McCarran International Airport just finished installing free wireless access across 90% of its public areas — not the first but by far the biggest domestic airport to do this.
In the U.S., it pioneered multi-airline, self-service kiosks, and ticket counters and gate podiums that can be shared by different carriers throughout the airport. In the cards this year are tags that emit radio signals to direct your bags to the right plane and remote check-in from hotels.
"They clearly are leaders," said Dick Marchi, senior vice president for technical and environmental affairs in Washington, D.C., for Airports Council International, an industry association based in Switzerland.
McCarran has achieved these firsts while struggling to keep pace with Sin City's explosive expansion. Passenger traffic doubled in fewer than 15 years, reaching 41.44 million last year, more than 14% over 2003. In April, the airport plans to add 10 gates.
"It's bursting at the seams," said Donn Walker, Los Angeles-based spokesman for the Federal Aviation Administration.
Congestion has contributed to late take-offs and long security lines. (More on that later.)
It's the high-tech gizmos that interest me most. They didn't happen by chance, said Randall Walker (no relation to the FAA's Walker), director of aviation for Clark County, Nev., which oversees McCarran.
On a tour of Singapore in the early 1990s, Walker, then deputy aviation director, discovered that airlines at Changi Airport shared a computer system. That meant ticket counters and gate podiums sat idle for fewer hours throughout the day as busier carriers took over stations from less busy ones. The result: You could process more customers with fewer stations.
"That's how you should run an airport," Walker said he told his boss.
U.S. airlines, accustomed to using proprietary software, were not impressed. When McCarran officials pitched the Changi concept to them, Walker recalled, "we could have harvested ice from that room, the reception was so chilly."
Over time, the ice melted, and McCarran rewired its terminals with fiber-optic cable to handle communications. Common wiring makes the innovations possible. Besides shared terminal equipment, these include:
? SpeedCheck: McCarran in October 2003 became the first U.S. airport to install multi-airline check-in kiosks known as SpeedCheck.
These now connect customers to the computer systems of more than half the airport's 28 airlines, allowing them to check in, print boarding passes and — if they have no bags to check — bypass the ticket counter. (SpeedCheck stations at the America West and Delta ticket areas handle bags too.)
? WiFi: By tapping into its own fiber-optic network, McCarran was able to install high-speed wireless access for a little more than $70,000, considered inexpensive for such a wide-ranging system.
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