Borry Vrieling

1. Tell us about your role and how you got here ? What inspired you to start Eezeetags ?

I am the founder, owner and managing director of Eezeetags. a label industry veteran and entrepreneur since 1995.

When the Airline Industry was shifting towards self-service for me it was very obvious that the world needed a smart label, that makes passengers understand how to tag a bag.

Especially after being confronted with self service at one point of time and me, being a professional, not able to understand how this particular tag worked, made me realize the need even more.

2. Describe your experience managing Eezeetags. How did you prioritize your investments ? What have been your experiences with tough decisions ? What’s the best advice you’ve ever received ?

Eezeetags are a spin-off of tags already produced in my other company Varilabel Europe BV.

So at first we needed no investments in production capacity, we decided to invest in marketing and knowledge of the Airline Industry by exhibiting and joining congresses around the world.

This gave us a network, especially with the self-service bag drop vendors. Biggest setback we had was the fact that none of the existing kiosk printers was able to work with Eezeetags in the standard set-up. And being in the early stages of SBD none of the printer manufacturers was willing to develop.

3. Would you tell us what is differentiating Eezeetags from its competitors ? Is there something you feel that you could not have created your business without?

Eezeetags is a patented and worldwide branded product and is the only product that has no need to pull away any liner to expose the adhesive.

This technique makes it possible to have a very simple language neutral instruction for the passengers, making tagging almost intuitive.

Eezeetags create also no waste at the point of tagging. The reason I have so much faith in our product is because of the fact that it is based on proven technologies already in use at other applications in other Industries also supplied by my company. So from a technical point no surprises are to be expected.

4. As the service industry continues to expand, airlines have a desire to computerize processes in order to reduce operational costs. What do you think about this ? Do you think that self-service is the future of customer engagement ?

The Airline Industry is certainly not the early adaptor of self service. I always compare it with the railway industry. In my youth I needed to stand in line and talk through a round window to the ticket sales person who had a big set of pre-printed route tickets behind the desk.

See where innovation has taken this industry into electronic checking in and out with a pre-paid electronic card.

And if you do not poses a card, you simply buy a ticket at a machine. It all has become more easy with less waiting lines. Passengers demand easy and affordable travel so also in the Airline Industry self-service is definitely going to be the future.

5. What advice would you give for a customer that is reading this?

Offcourse the hardware around a self-service option is really important as are the fast interactions with the mainframe systems like DCS and BHS.

But please do not forget about the smaller details because there will always be a weakest link. And the actual human behaviour and interaction with the system and media can easily become the non-controllable weakest link.

6. Knowing that PARTTEAM & OEMKIOSKS has the possibility of producing self-service kiosks for airports with the integration of Eezeetags, what is your opinion about the PARTTEAM & OEMKIOSKS company ?

PARTTEAM & OEMKIOSKS is one of the few kiosk manufacturers that first came to us to ask what the requirements should be to be able to use Eezeetags out of their systems, before even starting to develop a kiosk, In my opinion that is the proper order of developing.