The CUSS Handbook

Common-use self-service is the reason a passenger can walk up to any kiosk in a terminal, tap the airline they are flying with, and check in — instead of hunting for a machine that belongs to that carrier alone. This handbook explains how that works: the standard behind it, the parties who have to cooperate to deliver it, and the rules that govern it.

Independent reference. The CUSS Handbook is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or connected to IATA, ACI, SITA, MATERNA, or any kiosk manufacturer, software supplier, airline or airport operator. CUSS and CUPPS are open industry standards published by IATA; all other names are the property of their respective owners and are used here only for factual description.

What this handbook covers

Airport self-service is an unusually collaborative piece of technology. A single kiosk in a departures hall may be bought by the airport, installed by one supplier, certified against an industry specification, and then used in turn by a dozen airlines whose check-in software has never been tested on that exact machine. Making that work reliably, in public, thousands of times a day, is the entire point of the common-use standards.

The category has its own vocabulary, its own governance, and a body of published specification that most people working near it have never actually read. This site is an attempt at a plain, vendor-neutral account of it, written for airport IT teams, airline airport-systems staff, consultants, procurement officers and students — and pointed, wherever possible, at the primary sources rather than at anyone's marketing.

Start here

• What common use actually means — the problem it solves, and the difference between common use, shared use and dedicated equipment.
• The CUSS standard — what IATA Recommended Practice 1706c is, what it covers, and what it deliberately does not.
• How a CUSS platform is put together — application manager, applications, device components and system management.
• CUSS 2 and the move to web technologies — why the standard was rebuilt, and what the transition means for platforms already in the field.
• Who does what — platform suppliers, platform providers, application providers, application suppliers, and the service level agreement that binds them.
• CUPPS — the companion standard for shared check-in desks and gate podiums.
• Common-use self bag drop — where baggage acceptance fits, and why it is harder than check-in.
• Kiosk accessibility in the United States — the 25 percent rule and the technical specification behind it.

The short version

Before common use existed, an airline that wanted self-service check-in at an airport had to install its own kiosks. That worked for a dominant home carrier and worked badly for everybody else. A terminal serving forty airlines could not give forty airlines their own machines in every hall, and a bank of single-airline kiosks sits idle for most of the day while the queue for a neighbouring carrier runs down the concourse.

The answer was to separate the machine from the application. A common-use kiosk runs a launch screen owned by whoever operates the platform. A passenger selects an airline; the platform hands control to that airline's application; the application drives the same printer, the same scanner and the same card reader through a standard interface it does not have to know the make of. When the transaction ends, control returns to the launch screen and the next passenger may pick a different carrier entirely.

That separation is what the CUSS Recommended Practice defines, and it is why the standard spends far more of its length on interfaces, certification and operational responsibility than on anything a passenger would recognise.

Why standards, and why an industry body

Nothing about shared kiosks strictly requires a standard. An airport could specify a proprietary platform and require every carrier to build to it. Some did. The trouble is that an airline flies to hundreds of airports, and a separate integration for each one is a cost that scales with the network and never stops. A published, certified specification turns that into one integration reused everywhere, which is the only version of the idea that an airline will actually fund.

That is why the work sits with an industry body rather than with a vendor. IATA maintains the common-use Recommended Practices through its common use standards programme, with the specifications developed by working groups drawn from airlines, airports, industry associations and technology partners. The companion desk-and-gate standard, CUPPS, is co-published with Airports Council International, which represents the airport side of the same problem.

How to use this site

Every substantive claim here is attributed. Version numbers, publication dates, recommended practice numbers and regulatory citations are drawn from the standards bodies and regulators themselves, and the sources page lists them in one place with a note on what each one is good for. Where this handbook and a published standard disagree, the standard governs — and if you are specifying, procuring or certifying anything, the published specification is the document you need, not this one.

If you are new to the subject, read what common use actually means and then the short history. If you have arrived because you are writing a requirement or evaluating a bid, evaluating a common-use deployment and who does what are the two pages that will save you the most time. If you need a term defined quickly, try the glossary.