Queueing at the airport may go freemium

QueueSense Plus (4.3 stars, 12+, In-App Purchases). Know your place. QueueSense Plus uses on-device intelligence to predict, reserve and manage your position in every airport queue, so the only thing you carry through the terminal is certainty.

Airports increasingly sell paid fast-track security lanes and let passengers pre-book free security time slots through an app. Operators use sensors and predictive software to estimate queue lengths, plan staffing and publish live wait times in the terminal. Tiered and dynamic pricing has spread across air travel, from seat selection to lounge access. Consumer software in general has moved to subscription models with free, plus and premium levels, and on-device AI is now commonly marketed as the reason to pay for the upper tier.

Free: Standard Queue. Join the queue the airport has assigned to you and receive live updates on how long you have been in it. Plus (£6.99 a month): Predictive Queue. Arrive at the exact moment your slot opens and walk straight into a queue already in progress. Premium (£19.99 a month): Managed Queue. Our system queues on your behalf; you receive a notification when your waiting is complete. Family and Grief plans available. QueueSense Plus is designed to work with the airport, not against it. Position is not guaranteed. Your presence in the terminal may be used to improve the queue for others.

The listing, which appeared this week in the developer sandbox of a mid-sized airport operator, describes what the company's product notes call a “queue-as-a-service” model. Under the scheme, the physical line at security would no longer be a consequence of how many people turned up, but an output the operator sets each morning, alongside the temperature and the price of a sandwich. A queue of forty minutes would be maintained whether or not forty minutes of people existed. The notes refer to this as a “baseline”. Passengers refer to it as the queue.

Free-tier passengers would be placed in what the notes describe as the reference cohort, a group whose waiting is measured so that paying customers can be told how much of it they are avoiding. The cohort would be kept at a stable size by the system, which could hold a free passenger in position for several minutes after the line has cleared, “to preserve model continuity”. Tomasz Reidl, a warehouse supervisor flying to a wedding, said the app had thanked him for his contribution twice. “I wasn't waiting for anything,” he said. “I was waiting for the data.”

Plus subscribers would receive a notification telling them when to leave home, when to get out of the taxi and which of the six identical lanes has been made faster for them, for the next eleven minutes, by slowing the others. Because the system optimises for the terminal as a whole, a Plus passenger could be routed through a longer queue that moves rather than a shorter one that does not. Dana Ferreira, a nurse, said she had been sent to the queue for a different airline entirely. “It was efficient,” she said. “It just wasn't mine.”

Premium's Managed Queue would remove the passenger from the process altogether. A representation of the customer, built from their previous behaviour in queues, would be entered into the line at the appropriate time and would wait, in software, with the patience the model expects of them. The passenger would then be asked to attend the front of the queue in person, once, for the part where a human looks in the bag. Under the scheme, this would count as the queue having been completed. A receipt would be issued for the minutes waited on the customer's behalf, in case they were needed later.

A regional airport trialling a similar product would keep a queue running through the night, when no flights depart, so that the model does not lose its sense of what a queue is. Staff could find themselves stepping past a rope barrier at three in the morning and being asked by a screen whether they would like to upgrade. A spokesperson for the operator said the queue had never been the problem, only the uncertainty. “People do not mind waiting,” she said. “They mind not knowing which tier they are in.”

Cancelling the subscription would return the passenger to the free tier at their next airport, where the app would continue to run, unbilled, in order to measure them. A passenger who deletes it entirely would be treated as an anomaly and routed, for safety, to the longest available line. Marek Halloran, a retired surveyor, said he had stood in that line for an hour with three other people who had also uninstalled. “We got talking,” he said. “It was the nicest queue I've been in. I think that's what they're going to charge for next.”