Part of the Process

Leaving Athens Following on from my last trip to the SITA Summit in 2014  this year's SITA Forum in Athens had similar themes, but with a more airport focused audience. I think my biggest take away is that self-service is important ; not just as a method in cutting costs but also in improving the passenger experience ( #PaxEx ) via two main factors - control and information. Control To pick out the two salient illustrations of this, for control I'll turn to Patrice About from AirFrance. He made the point that consumer bag tracking devices now available for about $50, and these aren't under airline control or put in baggage with their knowledge. So the industry faces a choice - either find a way to work with passengers bring their own device or bury head in sand and have pax that are better informed than airline agents when a bag has been put on the wrong aircraft. This trend is happening now, the good news for airlines is that bag tag devices are GPS/sim based and m...

It's been a couple of weeks now but I thought I'd share some thoughts from this year's SITA Air Transport IT Summit 2014. From my personal perspective the interesting bits were around mobile and passenger communications. From the SITA survey results it looks like everything going self-service, with kiosks due to make a resurgence as a more intelligent touch point than the current check-in and boarding pass generators. A key target for investment over the next 3 years is predicted to be baggage services, which was good to hear since that's what we'd thought at 15below towers in creating our customer conference presentations. Given the infrastructure changes over the past few years I'm quite excited about how the passenger experience can be improved in this area - having had to wait 16hours for my bag to turn up with minimal contact or updates I would certainly appreciate that! After baggage, disruption management will be next, which does surprise me a bit...