Samuli Heljo | Only with boarding pass

The Blog

Only with boarding pass

published July 15, 2010

Um… what? That was my reaction to text which was displayed on Lufthansa’s check-in monitors at Helsinki-Vantaa airport. “Only with boarding pass” was clearly visible, but since I had not seen such instruction before, I could not tell what I was suppose to do. Shouldn’t I get the boarding pass from a check-in desk I was queuing to? There was pretty long line and thought of missing our flight crossed my mind… Luckily, gentleman behind us told that we were supposed to get boarding passes from self service kiosk and to use those at baggage drop. I felt like solving Leisure Suit Larry all over again.

“use check-in kiosk”
“give boarding pass”

The problem was that we definitely were not only ones that did not understand what to do. Most of the people just went directly to baggage drop desk without first printing boarding passes which slowed down the check-in process. Afterwards everything was pretty clear and “Only with boarding pass” made perfectly sense, why was it so hard?

First of all, most people did not have a script (internal instructions how to act) for this kind of event and therefore were clueless. Second thing that was wrong is that Lufthansa assumed that passengers knew more than they actually did. This is very common in IT also. Developers might assume that business people know “Strategy” design pattern or understand difference between Ant and Maven and communicate accordingly. Business side will use business acronyms that developers have no idea. Often people have a tendency to assume that their audience knows more about the subject than it actually does. This can lead to misunderstanding when neither side will not have courage to say “um… what, you lost me there”. This is especially a problem with younger people, that might just nod like they know what to do, but have no idea what should be done. (I remember doing this in my first job).

In Lufthansa’s case simple instruction like:

First do manual check-in at kiosk and then drop your baggage here. We do this to speed up our check-in process. There will be help available for you at the kiosk.

would have achieved what they were aiming for. To sum it up: