Sooner or later air travel is going to resume in something like what we recognize as “normal” fashion, very possibly surpassing pre-pandemic records. There’s a downside: when everyone is flying again you’ll be able to watch entire movies while waiting in those post-pandemic airport check-in lines.
There’s another way to do this — it’s disruptive, as good ideas often are — and it’s called “the distributed airport,” offering a new check-in process to decongest airports, improve user experience and make travel less of a fraught “hurry up and wait” situation.
Landline was originally formed to fill gaps in regional air service using comfy motor coaches instead of small planes, CEO David Sunde told PYMNTS, and when he started the company for that purpose “we never would’ve told you that this business had anything to do with distributing the airport. We were just so focused on this idea of reconnecting communities.”
Good ideas have a way of taking off, and the concept of building community hubs off airport grounds where travelers can check in, check bags and be screened comfortably is promising.
“Headlines are once again announcing congested airports and crazy lines,” he said. “If you think about it, big U.S. airports aren’t really built in places where you can just construct more real estate. LAX isn’t going to grow more. LaGuardia can’t grow any more into the water than it already has.”
It is possible, however, to “create screening footprint elsewhere, and essentially distribute where check-in happens, and that creates a much more efficient system.”
Working with a monolithic government security agency — the Transportation Safety Administration (TSA) — is a process of proving concept and gaining trust.
Conceding that much work remains, Sunde said working with the TSA is about “demonstrating that we do what we say we’re going to do.” That started with TSA allowing Landline buses to move baggage only. “We did that thousands of times without a problem, we passed hundreds of audits,” he said.
Another milestone was Landline’s 2021 pact with United Airlines, connecting travelers flying into Denver International to unserved regions by bus.
“We started departing from a gate on the tarmac,” he said. “If you landed in Denver and came to our headquarters in Fort Collins, you would actually walk down a jet bridge to get on the bus and reach your final destination. That was a huge step forward. Operating a motor coach with people on it on the active taxi way.”
Next up: this summer TSA will allow Landline to go for what Sunde calls “the holy grail” — checking passengers in, clearing them through security, putting them “on a bus in say, Allentown, Pennsylvania, taking you to Philadelphia, having you arrive at a gate.”
Just no airplane. And no check-in line.
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The Everywhere Airport
Calling TSA “an organization that has been very public about its desire to create more screening real estate,” Sunde said tests of the program are working now — and granting TSA’s wish.
“We want to be able to set up an airport or whatever you want to call it — a portal, whatever the term is — we want to be able to build a place where you can clear security and check in for your flight anywhere you want. We’ve gotten close to that already in different places. In Breckenridge, Colorado, which is a city that we serve for United, as an example.”
Joking that the Breckenridge site is “the world’s first ski-in/ski-out airport because it’s so close to the slopes that you can literally like get off the bus, put your boots on, walk out and start skiing,” Sunde described a clubhouse-like feel “with a United counter inside.”
“It feels sort of like a United club. Someday that will have a TSA checkpoint in it too, but I think what it is today is something that shows you what the future of the airport looks like, which is small, local, convenient, and where people actually want to start their trip.”
Landline makes its money from “contracts to fulfill service to airports that we set up. That is our role in this. The airline stands to benefit. If one airline has a better real estate footprint outside the airport than another, long term that can be really differentiating.”
Calling this a single branded airline experience door to door, he said “we’re just kind of the fulfillment partner in the background. We’re much more interested in building this kind of multimodal infrastructure than we are in building a consumer-facing brand.”
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Travel’s Multimodal Future
That “multimodal infrastructure” is the airport at the beginning of a new era in travel where people will book door-to-door instead of city-to-city.
“I spend a lot of time thinking about the travel day of the future, and the airport that you’re passing through is going to be sort of resultant of what the travel day looks like. In some cases, you will have a Landline checkpoint in your neighborhood. It’ll be small. It’ll be really efficient.”
That’s a revenue opportunity for airports as well as Landline itself.
He said checking in at a remote airport or at a hub airport will “be a decision that you can either pay more for, or pay less for, or it will be contemplated when an airline is selling you a certain itinerary. They’re going to route you the way that minimizes time.”
Starting with the idea of motor coaches to replace reduced regional air service, then taking that in the direction of TSA-approved remote check-in clubhouses, Sunde now sees travel improvement and logistics efficiencies everywhere.
He said, “A lot of the reason you see bottlenecks today is [people taking] Uber to LAX all at crazy different times, creating all this chaos.
“But if you enable the entire travel day to be more controlled and there can be price optimization, all of a sudden you can create a system that’s much more holistic and efficient. That’s kind of where I see our role.”
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