Air New Zealand builds its own self check-in kiosks, plans to license them out
Saturday, 14 March 2026
Air New Zealand has spent the past year developing its own self check-in kiosks, and expects to roll these out to all New Zealand airports this year and plans to license them to other airlines and airports.
The national carrier has begun looking inwards to solve its own technology problems, including building out its information technology and software development teams.
Its “next-gen” kiosks, made with Apple iPads, hardware and internal software programs, are the result of Air New Zealand’s research and development team needing to solve a problem they experienced daily.
“One of the things we got feedback from our front of house staff at the airports was our kiosks, that were over 10 years old now .. their reliability was starting to degrade and so we were seeing increasing drags and check-in tech failures, acceleratedcosts of maintenance and repair, and we looked at that and said ‘That’s a great problem to set up for this team’,” Air New Zealand chief customer and digital officer Jeremy O'Brien told The Post.
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“The brief was, how do we get kiosks that are quick and simple for customers to use, but also reliable and easy for our frontline staff.”
Work on the kiosks began in July 2024, and a handful are already in use at Auckland domestic airport.
“We talked to incumbent vendors, looked at how quickly that they could solve for us, but very quickly the team here said they wanted to have a crack at it,” said O’Brien.
“Its leveraged off a few other partnerships that we have. We have a very strong partnership with Apple, they’re interested in the problem we were looking to solve, it was unique - they hadn’t seen anyone else in the airline industry tackle that from the point of view of kiosks that used their very simple consumer-ready hardware like iPads.”
After a few months of “prototyping”, the first iteration of the kiosk was built. Once it was happy with the hardware, or the look, it built the internal technology; software code behind the applications.
“The hardware design piece is clever, but some of the magic is actually, our software engineers being able to write what we call translation code, which means that all the different systems and hardware can talk to each other.”
Air New Zealand ran a month-long trial in July with four of the kiosks at Auckland Airport, which processed 13,000 passenger journeys.
It found massive improvements compared with its current kiosks, O’Brien said, including how often ‒ and for how long ‒ a kiosk experienced issues such was down or offline.
“In terms of the check-in failure rate, where a customer comes to check-in and part way through the check in process they drop out, we dropped that down to less than 2% ‒ previously that had been double digits, so there was a significant decline.”
The time it took to check in for a flight also dropped down from 2 minutes 48 seconds to between 35 to 50 seconds, he said.
Air New Zealand staff also used iPhones with an app to process luggage drop-offs at Bag Drop, which had streamlined the check-in process, he said.
Over the course of this year Air New Zealand plans to replace all 230 kiosks across domestic airports with the next generation kiosks, before looking at its international airport network.
“We’ll go across all of the airports in New Zealand, and assuming they continue to perform well, we’ll progressively look at international airports we can roll these out too,” O’Brien said.
“At a global conference at the end of last year, we showed the progress we've made, and had interest from other airports, as well as airlines.
“First and foremost, we want to get the job done to solve this and get it out into our own network. But I definitely don't rule out the possibility that we could partner and work with others in the industry.”
Air New Zealand is not unfamiliar with commercialising its innovation. Many years ago it licensed and patented its Skycouch to French airline Air Austral and Brazil's Azul.
The airline has moved to an agile operating model and over the past four years expanded its in-house software engineering capability, with dozens more staff to build and deliver more of its core technology itself.
Air New Zealand also works with external companies such as Accenture and Tata Consultancy Services, to provide skilled software engineers who work alongside its teams to support its functions across online bookings, loyalty and cargo operations.
“Where we have a shortage in supply within the organisation, and it's normally within the entire market, then we're able to supplement our own craft areas and skills with those partners,” he said.
O’Brien said the self-service kiosks were one example of how its teams were innovating to solve customer problems to improve the travel experience.
Building the kiosks in-house enabled the company to spend less than it would have if it had sourced them from a provider externally, he said.
“It is enabling us to be much more productive and efficient.”