SITA predicts cellphone-driven revolution in air travel

Stuart Corner
Wednesday, 25 February 2009 01:25

IT Industry - Market

SITA, the airline-owned communications co-operative, has celebrated its sixtieth anniversary with the release of a white paper predicting massive changes in air travel and flight bookings thanks to the pervasiveness of cellphones.

In the paper, Ten Technology Advances That Will Change Air Travel, (available at www.sita.aero), SITA forecasts that "mobile devices are about to have the same impact on the passenger journey as the jet engine did 50 years ago."

Jim Peters, SITA's chief technology officer, said: "The rise of social networking over the Internet means that the days of the simple online flight-booking engine are numbered. Web 2.0 technologies will transform airline web sites into travel planning portals that go far beyond date and location. By making it faster, easier and more cost-effective to provide real-time content from diverse sources, Web 2.0 technologies meet travellers' demands for greater information and personalisation.

"In the near future when a customer makes a booking, the airline website could extract the passenger's preferences from its frequent flyer programme, combine it with external content from travel web sites so that hotels, restaurants and tourist attractions can be overlaid on a Google map and the traveller can then take a virtual sight-seeing tour and be linked in with friends' travel plans."

SITA claims that digitally-equipped passengers will access all their travel needs while on the move including purchasing airline tickets and checking-in. It claims that mobile boarding passes could save the industry $US500 million and that biometric identification and the use of mobile devices will also be boosted by the adoption of near field communications (NFC). "The technology is intelligent, secure and interactive which makes it ideal for the air transport industry," SITA says. It predicts that 30 percent of airports will be using biometric identification within five years, for border control and for flight check-in and boarding.

SITA also predicts that RFID will have a major impact on travel through RFID chips being embedded in e-passports and in luggage. "RFID is not a universal solution to the problem of mishandled baggage but if implemented system-wide it could save the industry $US750 million annually by ensuring origin-to-destination tracking of baggage," said Peters.

SITA was founded on 23 February 1949 by 11 airlines to provide shared information and telecommunications services to the air transport industry. Today it serves about 600 air transport industry members and 3,000 customers in over 220 countries and territories. 2007 revenues were $US1.42b.

How SITA turned Orange
It was SITA that spawned what is now Orange Business Services, the global arm of France Telecom by a tortuous process over several years. In October 1995 SITA announced plans to set up a fully commercial organisation to tackle the global marketplace in a joint venture with Morgan Stanley Capital Markets. This joint venture company took joint ownership with SITA of the existing SITA global network and a new operating company, Scitor Communications, owned by the joint venture was created to take over the operations of SITA's existing commercial arms: Scitor and International Telecommunications Services (ITS). Scitor had been formed by SITA in 1992 to provide a value added services to customers in areas associated with the air travel industry including car rental companies, hotels, banks, aerospace suppliers and manufacturing and distribution companies.

In early 1997, Scitor changed its name to Equant and announced plans to compete more aggressively with the other major global telcos. A similar entity. GlobalOne has been created in early 1996 as a joint venture between Sprint, Deutsche Telekom and France Telecom. Then in 2001 Equant bought GlobalOne - which had long struggled thanks to the disparate interests of its shareholders - and France Telecom bought out SITA's stake in Equant to take total control of the merged Equant/GlobalOne.