Mumbai airport sees steep rise in biometric verification, self-service baggage drops

Mumbai Sep 25 (PTI) Mumbai International Airport (MIAL) has witnessed increased adoption of biometric verification, self-service baggage drops, and common-use self-check-in kiosks in the past 15 months, according to a statement on Thursday.

The airport operator said over 3.86 million passengers printed their boarding passes using self-check-in kiosk between April 2024 and August 2025 while 7.15 lakh bags were processed using 32 self-baggage drops (SBD) units.

SBD witnessed increase in monthly adoption rate from 4.15 per cent in April 2024 to over 13.9 per cent in August 2025 for international passengers and from 5.26 per cent in April 2024 to 6.28 per cent in August 2025 for domestic fliers, MIAL said.

Self-check-in kiosks offer passengers the convenience of checking in, printing boarding passes, generating baggage tags and modifying seat preferences without waiting at counters.

The shift in self-check-in was led by the domestic airlines with IndiGo (2.58 million boarding passes), Air India (1.09 million boarding passes) and Air India Express (53,301 boarding passes) recording the highest usage of these kiosks in the reporting period, it said.

Among international airlines, Air France (90,902), Emirates (18,356), and Lufthansa (18,017) saw growing engagement, MIAL said.

This year August alone witnessed 264,414 boarding passes printed on self-check-in kiosk by users, nearly 41.84 per cent increase over April 2024 (1,86,419 boarding passes), as per the airport operator.

The rising trend of self-baggage drop machines used by passengers is driving the airport's transition from traditional counters to hybrid-SBD check-in models, it said. PTI IAS TRB TRB