SINGAPORE – Say you’ve booked a flight for your long-awaited holiday at 10pm on a Friday, but want to check-in and drop off your baggage before heading to work in the morning. Or perhaps you’re a tourist in Singapore and you have to check out of your hotel room hours before your flight. Instead of dragging your luggage everywhere, passengers travelling with 23 participating airlines can now check-in as early as 24 hours before their scheduled departure at Changi Airport.

Since the start of the year, common early check-in counters have been set up at Terminals 2 and 3, and an early check-in lounge at Terminal 1. The counters and lounge, which are open from 6am to midnight daily, allow passengers to check-in 12 or 24 hours before the flight’s scheduled departure, depending on the airline. The 23 airlines together serve more than 3.7 million passengers a year, or 13 per cent of passengers departing from Changi.

The idea behind this initiative, said Changi Airport Group (CAG), is to smoothen the flow of passengers beyond the peak period which typically start at about two hours before the flight departures.

Some another 25 airlines separately offer early check-in service at their own counters.

“Reducing the peak load shortens queues and lessens the stress on the check-in team. Overall, there is a better travel experience for passengers. At the same time, it allows for more optimal utilisation of check-in resources, resulting in capacity and productivity gains. In a manpower shortage environment, this resource pooling initiative between airlines and airport will have positive implications,” said Mr Albert Lim, Vice President for Passenger Experience at CAG.

Since the implementation of the common early check in facility, the percentage of departing passengers that have checked in early at Changi has increased from 8 to 12 per cent, Changi said.

Changi is the world’s seventh busiest airport for international traffic, serving more than 55 million passengers from around the globe last year. The airport handles about 6,800 flights every week, or about one every 90 seconds.

Changi, Mr Lim said, is one of the first airports in the world to offer a common early check-in service across airlines.

Based on a CAG survey, more than 40 per cent of travellers are not aware of the availability of early check-in when flying. It is estimated that each year, for various reasons, more than 10,000 passengers fail to check in for their flights at Changi.