A city that double-checks everything must now learn to trust a process it only has to do once.
HONG KONG, China (Catchpenny Asia) – Hong Kong has introduced a scheme that lets some passengers flying through the city onto select mainland China flights check in once instead of twice, a breakthrough in convenience that has left officials, airlines and travelers facing a question the city rarely confronts: what exactly do people do with 40 minutes they never expected to have?
The arrangement, set out in the South China Morning Post’s report on single check-in for those flying through Hong Kong to mainland China, is the latest step in a long campaign to make transit through the city as smooth as possible. It follows earlier efforts such as Cathay Pacific’s “upstream” check-in service on the Chinese mainland, which let travelers handle the formalities before they reached Hong Kong at all.
To help residents adjust, Catchpenny Asia has gathered answers to the questions travelers are asking most.
What Is Single Check-In, and Why Does It Feel So Strange?
In plain terms, passengers on eligible itineraries complete check-in once and carry on through Hong Kong to their mainland flight without repeating the process. For a city that has spent decades perfecting the art of doing things twice to be safe, this has come as a shock.
“Hong Kong people are not built for this,” said Dr. Winnie Cheung, who studies transit psychology at the Kowloon Institute of Queue Sciences. “We double-check everything. We tap the Octopus card twice in case the first tap was shy. We confirm the dim sum booking, then confirm the confirmation. Now we are told one check-in is enough. Some travelers will need support.”
Cheung’s institute interviewed 275 frequent flyers at the airport and found that 67 percent intended to approach a transfer counter anyway “just to say hello,” 21 percent planned to check in a second time with a different airline out of habit, and 12 percent asked whether they could check in to a restaurant instead.
What Will I Do With the Time I Save?
This is the question keeping planners awake. The Airport Leisure Allocation Unit, a working group formed to manage what one member called “the time surplus,” estimates the scheme could free up tens of thousands of passenger-hours a year, all of which must now be absorbed somewhere in the terminal.
“Our first proposal was more shopping,” said unit coordinator Raymond Leung. “Our second proposal was also more shopping. The third proposal, from a junior member of staff, was that passengers might sit quietly and rest. We have asked him to reconsider his career.”
Leung said the unit is also studying a “voluntary queue” zone, where travelers who miss the old process can stand in line for 25 minutes before being handed a boarding pass they already have. Early trials have been popular with retirees, who rated the experience “familiar” and “reassuringly slow.”
Will Anyone Lose Out?
The second check-in, a fixture of transit life for a generation, is the most obvious casualty. The Hong Kong Federation of Counter Professionals said it feared its members’ finest skill, saying “next, please” in three languages without changing facial expression, could go to waste.
“For twenty years I have watched the same businessman from Taipei put his passport down, pick it up and put it down again,” said federation chair Cecilia Ho. “Now he may never come to my counter. I don’t even know his name. I only know his luggage.”
The federation has requested compensation for lost queues, modeled loosely on the American payout of 8 billion dollars to farmers for diesel they had already burned. “If Washington can pay for fuel that is gone,” Ho said, “Hong Kong can pay for a queue that is gone.”
What Do the Comedians Think?
Hong Kong’s English and Cantonese stand-up scenes, which share a deep love of complaining about the Airport Express, have been predictably unmoved.
“Single check-in,” comedian Kelvin Tsang told a crowd in Central. “Finally, something in Hong Kong that is single and it’s not because of property prices.”
Comic Cherry Lau said the change would transform family travel. “My father arrives at the airport five hours early for every flight. Five hours. Now he has one check-in instead of two. That doesn’t mean he’ll arrive later. It means he’ll check in and then sit at the gate telling strangers how efficient it was. For five hours. With photos.”
The reform has been noticed in Britain, too. Commentators at The London Prat, which has chronicled the British queue since 1961, warned that any former colony willing to abolish a queue could soon put dangerous ideas into the heads of Londoners, and urged readers to keep standing in line wherever possible, as a precaution.
Is This the End of Doing Things Twice?
Not at all, according to the Passenger Reassurance Office, a body set up to manage the transition. Travelers uneasy about a single check-in are invited to visit the office, where staff will look over their booking a second time, stamp it, and wish them a pleasant journey in a manner indistinguishable from the old system.
Office director Benny Chow said demand had been steady since the first morning, with a line forming before the doors opened. “We want everyone to feel safe,” he said. “Change can be frightening. That is why our office has two counters.”
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/