Leader: The lesson of DIY check-ins

The start of the week saw the posting of Peter Cochrane's latest blog entry. Regular readers will know that Peter, apart from being one of the best-known tech commentators in the UK, is a frequent traveller.

Not everyone agrees with his musings on travel - a separate network of business-oriented airports hardly gets the green vote, for example - but he usually speaks a lot of sense, born from years of travel and knowledge of what can be done with IT and communications to make everything run more smoothly.

The subject of self-service vis-à-vis airports and airlines strikes a chord with most of us and was the hook for Peter's latest blog. It is also a big subject beyond travel.

Peter was reacting to an elementary point made by readers of his blogs: self-service check-in promises to be a boon to airlines and passengers alike. It should ensure faster check-in (good for us) and lower costs for the airlines (good for them).

The trouble is that it often goes wrong, meaning an airline doesn't substitute a cost - of an expensive, manned check-in desk - but adds to it, in the form of the new equipment, the space it takes up and so on.

This happens all too frequently.

It's not a unique problem. When banking first started over the telephone and then over the web, many banks found they weren't saving money but feeling the cost of adding new channels - at least in the short term.

Over time, more of us have migrated away from branches and even away from call centres. Entering a branch or communicating with a bank over the phone is increasingly rare for a lot of people.

And it isn't only about the internet. A press release that passed the silicon.com newsdesk this week spoke of the way in which Travelodge - the budget hotel operator which says it wants to be London's biggest hotelier in time for the 2012 Olympics - is using speech recognition technology from Fluency to take bookings, boosting room occupancy rates.

The bottom line on this is familiar to readers of these pages. The use of technology for self-service - the use of technology for anything - is to be welcomed, so long as it is done well.

Self-service check-in at many of the major airlines is lamentable right now but what we are witnessing are teething troubles. Let's hope they are fixed soon and we can get on with life.