EnlargeChris McPherson

EnlargeChris McPherson

It's Wednesday morning at Seattle-Tacoma International Airport, and the United Airlines check-in area is a mob scene. Passengers queue up in a line that runs the length of the counter and doubles back. Customers waiting for agents block the self-serve kiosks. Finished passengers must push through the crowd again. Average check-in time: 25 to 30 minutes.

Down the hall at Alaska Airlines, employees roam a spacious hall, directing customers toward kiosks. Lines aren't more than three deep, and travelers are on their way to security in eight minutes or less. One woman pauses, looking confused, and another turns and says, "It's this new check-in thing. Don't worry, it's really fast."

Moving customers from frustration to relief--in a fraction of the time--has been at the root of Alaska Airlines' Airport of the Future project. The carrier has spent more than a decade designing a better way to get customers through airport check-in, debuting the first iteration in its Anchorage terminal in 2004. Last October, the $3.3 billion carrier began rolling out its redesign in Seattle, where Alaska and its sister airline, Horizon, have almost 50% market share. The project, to be completed in May, has already reduced wait times and increased agent productivity. "People come to the airport expecting to stand in line," says Ed White, Alaska's VP of corporate real estate, who ran the project. "It's an indictment of our industry."

Alaska's embrace of the future came out of necessity. By the mid-1990s, it was running out of space to handle its Seattle passengers. "If you came here on a busy day, it was jammed," White says. A new terminal, though, would have cost around $500 million. Alaska tried self-serve kiosks, but technology alone wasn't the answer. Kiosks were pushed against the ticket counter, which only further stagnated the flow of passengers.

White assembled a team of employees from across the company to design a better system. It visited theme parks, hospitals, and retailers to see what it could learn. It found less confusion and shorter waits at places where employees were available to direct customers. "Disneyland is great at this," says Jeff Anderson, a member of White's skunk works. "They have their people in all the right places."

The team began brainstorming lobby ideas. At a Seattle warehouse, it built mock-ups, using cardboard boxes for podiums, kiosks, and belts. It tested a curved design, one resembling a fishbone, and one with counters placed at 90-degree angles to each other. It built a small prototype in Anchorage to test systems with real passengers and Alaska employees. The resulting minor changes, such as moving the button that sends a bag down the conveyor belt, "increased agents' efficiency and prevented them from straining themselves," says Gordon Edberg, a principal at ECH Architecture who helped implement the adjustments.

The Seattle design begins with a deep lobby where 50 kiosks are pushed to the front and concentrated in banks. "You need to cluster kiosks in the 'decision zones' where passengers decide what to do within 15 seconds," says airline technology expert Kevin Peterson. Alaska placed "lobby coordinators" out front, à la Disneyland, to help educate travelers. The 56 bag-drop stations are further back and arranged so that passengers can see security.