The CUSS Handbook  /  A short history of common use

A short history of common use

The standard is now old enough to have a history worth telling, and telling it accurately matters, because a great deal of what circulates about the early years is vendor marketing rather than record. What follows is limited to milestones attributable to the standards bodies themselves.

Before the standard: single-airline kiosks

Self-service check-in arrived in the late 1990s in its obvious first form: an airline installed its own machines, running its own software, in the halls where it had enough departures to justify them. It worked. It also scaled badly in exactly the way described on the common use page — a terminal serving dozens of carriers cannot host dozens of separate kiosk estates, and machines dedicated to one airline sit idle whenever that airline is not operating.

The constraint was structural rather than technical, and it was visible to everyone at once, which is generally the condition under which an industry standard actually gets written.

1999: IATA forms the CUSS Management Group

IATA established a Common Use Self Service Management Group in 1999 to define standards for self-service kiosks that could be shared by multiple airlines. That is the origin point of the standard, and the governance choice embedded in it — that the specification would belong to an industry body rather than to a supplier — is what made airline investment in it rational.

2003: version 1.0, and production deployment

IATA published version 1.0 of the CUSS standard in 2003, and CUSS has been in production since that year. The four years between the management group and the published version are typical for a specification that has to satisfy airlines, airports and technology suppliers simultaneously, none of whom had an incentive to accept anyone else's existing implementation as the base.

The first large multi-airline shared kiosk installations followed in the same period, which is the point at which the idea stopped being a specification and started being infrastructure.

2003–2010: adoption

Adoption through the 2000s was rapid by the standards of airport infrastructure. By the end of 2008, CUSS had been implemented at more than 100 airports worldwide.

Two things drove it. The airport case was terminal capacity, which is always the airport's binding constraint. The airline case was network economics: once enough airports offered a certified platform, writing one application for all of them beat writing none and staffing more desks. The standard reached the point where adopting it was cheaper than not, which is the only durable reason a standard succeeds.

The desk and gate side: CUPPS

Self-service was only half the estate. Staffed check-in desks and gate podiums had their own common-use history, inherited from an earlier generation of common-use terminal equipment, and their own standardisation effort. That produced CUPPS, published by IATA as Recommended Practice 1797 and jointly by Airports Council International as ACI RP 500A07 — a joint publication that reflects how much of the problem is airport infrastructure rather than airline software.

Governance today

The common-use standards are developed and maintained through IATA's Customer Journey Delivery Working Group, whose membership comprises airlines, airports, IATA strategic partners and industry associations. Responsibility for Recommended Practice 1706c and the maintenance of its technical specifications sits with the CUSS Task Force.

Alongside CUSS and CUPPS, the family now includes Common Use Web Services (Recommended Practice 1741), which standardises data exchange supporting common-use self bag drop and covers passenger identification management, airside security access and boarding; and the Bar Coded Boarding Pass standard (Resolution 792), whose version 8 took effect on 1 June 2020 and which is what makes a boarding pass printed at a shared kiosk readable everywhere downstream.

2023 onwards: the second generation

The 1.x line ran for two decades on interface technology chosen in the early 2000s. Its replacement was published as a technical specification on 31 March 2023; the CUSS 2 transition phase opened on 1 January 2024; and CUSS 1.x platforms were discontinued as of 1 January 2026.

That is the largest discontinuity in the standard's history and the one currently reshaping the installed base. It is covered in detail on the CUSS 2 page.