Smart Flyers Mobile Application
With air travel getting more affordable, the number of air travellers are increasing. As such, air travellers often face some form of issues before or after their flights. Those issues include not having the printed boarding pass on hand when they reach the airport, facing difficulties to look for flight information displays at the airport, waiting in long queues before using the airport transports and do not know the latest situation at the airport before going there. These issues may bring some negative consequences to the air travellers. Hence, an Android based mobile application called “Smart Flyers” has been developed to help air travellers to overcome the issues stated above. In this mobile application, there are four main functionalities, which are flight boarding pass functionality, flight information functionality, airport transport booking functionality and the social aspect functionality. For this mobile application, the programming language used are Android Java Programming Language, Hypertext Pre-processor (PHP) and Structured Query Language (SQL) whereas the development software used are Android Studio and Notepad++. In short, the goal of Smart Flyers mobile application is to bring convenience to the air travellers by helping them to mitigate the issues that they face before or after their flight.
Nowadays, air travel has become common throughout the world. According to an air traveller statistic by the International Civil Aviation Organization, 3.441 billion of people around the world have travelled by air in 2015 [1]. Thislarge number of air travellers depicts that many people all over the world prefers to travel by air today. Among these 3.4 billion air travellers, some of them may face some issues before or after their flight. For example, do not have printed flight boarding pass on hand at the airport [2], face some difficulties when looking for the flight information display at the airport,wait in a long queue at the airport transportation service counter [3] and do not know about the latest situation at the airport before going there. These issues will bring a lot of inconveniences and consequences to the air travellers. Therefore, a mobile application called “Smart Flyers” has been developed to help the air travellers to overcome the issues stated above which they may face before or after their flight. The word ‘Smart’ in this paper refers to the air traveller’s ability to plan their travels in a more effective manner via a mobile application. In the developed Smart Flyers mobile application, there are four main functionalities. The first functionality is the flight boarding pass functionality which allows the air travellers to obtain their mobile flight boarding pass on their smartphones; the second functionality is the flight information functionality which allows the air travellers to check the flight information of their flight directly on their smartphones; the third functionality is the airport transport booking functionality which allows the air travellers to book an airport transport early by using their smartphones; the fourth functionality is the social aspect functionality which allows the air travellers to make friends and share the information news and updates of the airport with each other. In this paper, there are several sections that provides a more thorough perspective to the system. The upcoming section will be discussing about why there is a need for a more effective air traveller mobile application. This section is then followed by the section which examines the existing systems for air travellers. Code Shoppy Next, we then further highlight the four main functionalities in the mobile application and how it can be used to overcome the issues faced by the air travellers during theirflight. This is then followed by the system implementation and development section which discusses about the platform, language and development software used to implement the mobile application.
There are several issues which is commonly faced by air travellers before or after their flights. These issues occur due to certain reasons which may bring some inconveniences to the air travellers. Table I highlights the issues which may be faced by the air travellers today with their respective reason of occurrence and consequences.
As a result of the existing issues faced by air travellers, there are a number of mobile applications developed by airlinesand airports. The mobile applications in Table II below are some of the existing applications developed for the air travellers today and they can be found in the Google Play Storeand Apple App Store. Some of these existing applications can only help air travellers to solve the issue of not having flight boarding pass on hand or not knowing the location of the flightinformation display board in the airport. None of these existing applications and other existing applications in Google Play Store and Apple App Store can help the air travellers to avoid long queue at the airport transportation service counter or tell the air travellers about the latest situation at the airport.
