New technology to help passengers during busy travel season

Lisa Snedeker

Monday, Nov. 20, 2000 | 2:03 a.m.

Passengers flying in and out of McCarran International Airport during the busy holiday season might encounter fewer delays than at other airports across the country thanks to new technology.

McCarran is the only airport in the nation to link its flight information display system with its gate management system, said Howard Kourik, airport information services manager.

The airport's network provides total interchangeability of gates, airlines, aircraft and information systems, said Randy Walker, director of the Clark County Department of Aviation, which manages McCarran.

That means fewer delays on the tarmac and fewer missed connections at the nation's seventh busiest airport.

And that's good news considering flight delays is the top complaint received by passengerrights.com, said Chad Ulery, spokesman for the website.

"McCarran is passenger friendly," Ulery said. "We'll give a thumbs up to anyone who tries to improve those efforts."

About 500,000 people are expected to travel through McCarran this Thanksgiving week, said Debbie Millett, spokeswoman for the airport, which had the nation's 11th highest passenger count last year.

The new system allows airport managers to reassign incoming aircraft to any available gate and automatically update the change on the passenger information displays, the airport's website and its telephone voice response system. The new gate automatically lights up with correct flight information and airline branding.

"We believe it will make getting through the airport a much more efficient and pleasant experience," Walker said.

The system provides badly needed flexibility, especially during the busy holiday travel period.

"I really like the system because I can go to any gate," said Dave Ellis, Las Vegas station manager for Allegiant Air, a small carrier that averages five flights a day to various points on the West Coast. "Because I'm a small airline, I get moved around a lot."

Dave Cahill, director of airport operations for Las Vegas-based National Airlines, said the system helps inform passengers and addresses his biggest customer concern of having different information at different locations.

"If I have two or three different people updating systems there's a tendency to put the wrong information in the wrong location, which will confuse customers," Cahill said. "One of our biggest challenges is providing up-to-date and accurate information for our customers."

Ongoing changes at McCarran might be one of the reasons the Las Vegas airport has tied for the No. 2 airport in passenger satisfaction among the nation's 16 largest facilities in a survey released earlier this month by J.D. Power and Associates.

McCarran received a 108 rating in the survey, tied with Denver International Airport and one point behind No. 1 Orlando (Fla.) International Airport. The industry average was 100.

Since the airport added its "D" gates in June 1998, the airport has increased its volume by 20 percent, Walker said.

McCarran had 33.7 million arriving and departing passengers in 1999. Through September the count was at 27.5 million, up 9.1 percent from a year ago.

The new technology allows the airport to grow in volume without growing physically, Walker said.

"So flight by flight we can change gates," Walker said.

Before gates were linked to only a single airline, but now the county owns the computer system at each gate. A logon and a password connects the county's central computer to the airline's host computer.

"We might have as many as four airlines use one gate in one day," he said. "If we didn't have the system we have today we couldn't have handled the volume."