The FINANCIAL — easyJet has on May 12 opened its new check in area in the North Terminal at London Gatwick Airport which is the world’s largest self-service bag drop. The fully automated bag drop facility for customers will help to reduce and eliminate check in queues. As a result of its introduction queue times have reduced by half and more than 90% of our passengers will wait less than 5 minutes at bag drop.
The area, which is over 5,000 square metres, contains 48 self-service bag drop kiosks. Customers arriving into the area are welcomed by easyJet Welcome Hosts who guide them into the auto bag drop area. Customers’ passports are then verified against their boarding pass before they can proceed to the self service kiosks to place their bags onto a weigh scale. A luggage tag is then automatically generated by the kiosks and attached to the bag by the customer. This tag is then verified by laser scanners to check the information is correct and the label attached securely before the bag is dispatched through the airport’s baggage system to the aircraft, according to easyJet.
This opening enables easyJet to fully consolidate its full operation at Gatwick to the North Terminal in January 2017, creating an easier and improved travel experience for passengers travelling from London Gatwick.
Sophie Dekkers, easyJet’s UK Director, said: “As our largest base Gatwick is of huge importance to easyJet both strategically and for the millions of our passengers who travel through the airport every year.
“We recognise that our customer’s airport experience is a crucial part of their overall journey and so we are delighted to have opened this new area for our customers flying from London Gatwick.
“Our vision is for Gatwick to be both our biggest and best airport and this opening enables us to further deliver on our ambition to make travel easy and affordable for all of our customers.
Chris Hope, easyJet’s Head of Gatwick, said: “These new self-service kiosks provide a glimpse into the future of airport design and enable our customers flying from London Gatwick to have unique use of the most innovative state of the art facilities.
“In January 2017 we will move all of our operation into one terminal enabling easyJet and Gatwick to deliver an improved experience for our passengers.
“Alongside the consolidation to one terminal we also plan to continue to grow at Gatwick through increasing our destinations, further improving our schedule and by deploying larger aircraft as we replace smaller A319s with 186 seat A320s and, from 2017, A320Neos.”
Guy Stephenson, Chief Commercial Officer for Gatwick Airport said: “We are half way through a £2.5 billion programme of investment and the transformation of our North Terminal is a key part of this. Creating new spaces which allow new technology to speed passengers through the processing part of their journey will help us eliminate queues, handle greater numbers of passengers and put people in charge of how they spent their time at the airport”.
easyJet started flying from London Gatwick Airport in 1999 and now has 60 aircraft based there, operating on 106 routes. This year the airline will fly over 18 million passengers to and from Gatwick and has around 1400 cabin crew and 700 pilots operating from the airport.
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