A cool feature would be to be able to have different airlines choose their check-in assignments depending on airline budget, airline size, and terminal space.
Say my airport has NAS, and Maple, and is a hub for Air Strada, and a focus city for SkyLink. Maybe because SkyLink has a focus city, there are too many options for each flight to have their own desk, but maybe a desk serves 3 flights, since that would be suitable to the size of their operations. Maple and NAS, on the other hand, would each have a flight dedicated to a check-in desk because there are not many flights at that airport for those airlines, and they only have 1 or 2 desks. Meanwhile, Air Strada has a bunch of check-in desks because of the size of their operations and there are no rules that say pax from flight 1442 cannot use a certain desk.
This is a good idea.
For example at a medium-sized airport, such as Edinburgh (EDI), most check-in desks are dedicated to airlines - for example, Easyjet has about 8 out so baggage desks. However, some are unassigned - an airline which operates 1 flight a day might use one of these. The next flight at this desk might be by another airline, and so on.
I also think that any plans for any flight can use any desk from that airline, which makes the process for efficient for the airline.
These features would be nice to see in ACEO sometime, but I know the developers are currently focusing on the Steam process. (Can’t wait!)
In addition, depending on how big your terminal is, how many check-in desks you have, and the airlines budget, airlines could pick where their check-in desks are.
Absolutely!! It would make things much more realistic! In every airport I’ve been in airlines are located at the same desks/area of ticketing/check-in.
You could also charge a fee to airlines to have threir own desk(s), and the airlines logo would be on display above the desks.
It’s not uncommon for airlines who have a hub at an airport to have a whole terminal or concourse dedicated to them.
While from a realistic point of view this would be great and definitely happens in real life (checked in as described above this morning in Dubrovnik) we do keep in mind what the devs said about the coding and how the current system this would not be possible.
I can see an issue with this being that if an airline has miliple flights from one desk you would need a system clever enough to sort them out to destinations and also allow for the queue to be jumped if there were passengers of an soon to depart flight stick behind early passengers for another or flights would get delays.
That being said been able to alllcare deals to airlines would be a nice future feature and a good contract requirement.