Bar-Coded Boarding Passes (BCBP) Implementation guide - IATA

Introduction
Paper stock
ATB2 reader
Between USD 3,500 and USD
5,000
Plain paper stock Less than USD 0.01
ATB2 paper stock (with a
magnetic stripe)
Between USD 0.03 and USD
0.06
Based on data kindly provided by airlines and airports, we assume the following industry average
costs for the purpose of our analysis:
Category Service Unit costs
With bags
Without bags
Processing a passenger with bags at a check-in
desk (including CUTE charges and staff)
Processing only bags for a checked-in passenger
(including CUTE charges and staff)
Processing a passenger without bags at a checkin
desk (including CUTE charges and staff)
Check-in a passenger on a web site (marginal
cost)
USD 4.50
USD 1.50
USD 3.00
USD 0.00
2.5.2. Implementation costs
Implementing BCBP will be a different project from one airline to the other, depending on the
airline’s existing infrastructure and strategy, with a clear impact on costs:
• One airline, owning its Departure Control System, may face significant IT development
cost to upgrade the system to produce the 2D bar code with the right data, whereas
another airline, using a system provider’s solution, may benefit from the BCBP free of
charge (included as the default boarding pass).
• One airline, owning its boarding pass printers and boarding gate readers at each station,
may incur a large investment cost when replacing all of them, whereas another airline,
using shared printers and readers at all stations, may benefit from 2D capable devices
provided at a lower cost by the airports or ground handlers.
• One airline, with strong branding requirements, may spend a large amount of time and
money on designing a new boarding pass, including colour background, whereas another
airline, more focused on costs, may decide to use blank paper stock across the network
and IATA’s recommended layout, in order to minimise operating costs.
As a conclusion, the implementation cost may be very low for an airline operating in common use
environment on plain stock, or pretty high for an airline operating mostly in a dedicated
environment with dedicated stock.
The savings will also vary accordingly. The latter will mainly save by enabling web and mobile
check-in, whereas the former will mainly save from reducing infrastructure operating costs.
2.5.3. Comparison between BCBP and other solutions
There are two main business cases for the adoption of the BCBP standard:
• Either the airline is using boarding passes with magnetic stripes
• Or the airline is using boarding passes with 1D bar codes.
The following table (see fig. 6) compares the BCBP standard to the two main alternatives:
4 th edition - June 2009 - www.iata.org/stb/bcbp 9/128