Skift Take
Airlines and airports own SITA, but the two groups are at odds over who controls passenger data. New CEO Barbara Dalibard shows signs of having enough finesse to keep the company unified.
Editor's Note: This year we expanded our coverage of the technology companies that do the behind-the-scenes work of powering the technology systems of the world's major travel companies.
We’re sitting down with a handful of industry leaders for our new Travel Tech CEO Listening Series to discover where they think the industry is heading.
SITA is a Geneva-based organization owned by the air transport industry. (It prefers to be known as SITA, not as Société Internationale de Télécommunications Aéronautiques — perhaps because it knows acronyms are très chic.)
Nearly every passenger flight relies on SITA technology, which allows the company to earn about $1.7 billion a year in revenue.
About 1,000 airports use its systems for tasks such as monitoring airport operations, operating boarding gates, and processing baggage and passengers.
In recent years SITA has attempted to apply new technologies to help solve old problems.
It was behind Virgin Atlantic's trial of having gate agents use Google Glass to check in first-class passengers more quickly, and Malaysian Airlines' experiment in Facebook-based flight booking.
This week SITA revealed its experiments with a robotic check-in kiosk. The robot uses airport data on the most congested areas for passenger check-in and moves there to provide more self-service options, as needed.
At Brisbane Airport, the company is testing facial recognition technology as an alternative method of identification for Air New Zealand passengers checking in. (The system doesn't yet integrate with government systems for border checkpoints, but the tests continue.)
SITA is also trialing virtual passports, which would let a traveler use a secure token (via a smartphone or wearable device) to generate a QR code, which the traveler flashes at checkpoints or kiosks throughout the airport journey (instead of showing papers).
Australia’s Outward Advance Passenger Processing program for exit checks, introduced last year, uses automated border gates. (In fact, on Monday, Australian airports discovered how dependent they are on SITA, when a third-party provider to a SITA data center failed, and immigration services had to be done manually for a few hours nationwide, causing hour-long delays.)
In March 2017, SITA invested in LocusLabs, a San Francisco-based startup that uses new technologies to create interior maps of the stores, products, and services of more than 70 airports and other venues.
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