AVIOINTERVIEW: Sergio Colella, President of SITA Europe at the Aviation-Event Sofia 2024

The core of the solution is called the Airport Management System. It's the global orchestrator of the airport that allows the airport to operate effectively, to allocate resources in an intelligent way, to manage the flow of passengers, and to manage as well the air side and the land side of the airport. We do intend to increase productivity and effectiveness, but also to reduce, for instance, carbon emissions by reducing the taxi time for the flights. Also to improve the passenger experience so that queues are minimized and people have a seamless passenger experience. So we aim to deliver a project that will go live in 2026. And so we have a lot of work ahead of us, but leveraging this technology, Sofia Airport will become probably one of the leaders in terms of passenger experience.

Unfortunately, we cannot share this kind of information. We went through a formal tender, a European tender, against many other competitors, and we have been fortunate, and I hope good in a way, that Sofia selected SITA among many other competitors.

It's going to streamline the process of checking in, boarding the aircraft, and everything in between. Yes, every touch point of the passenger should be optimized. So basically, when I arrive at the airport, I need to drop my luggage. We want to have self-service bag drops that would allow a seamless passenger experience where leaving the luggage, when I go through security, when I print my boarding pass, before boarding, if I have to cross police control—all of these touch points over time should be digitalized. And we want to have an experience where my face becomes my boarding pass, my mobile phone is the remote controller of the flight, so I have all the information I need on my smartphone. And basically, I can spend more time drinking a good coffee instead of queuing in the airport.

This is the key advantage of SITA because we are putting together airlines, governments, and airports. So we serve airlines; we create and deliver solutions for airlines, for government, for border management, and to airports. So we are going to facilitate that integration. But you are right, this is an element of difficulty because the level of maturity of the different airlines are different. And the scope, the objective, is to bring all of the airlines to the target operating model in order to have a seamless passenger experience, where wherever I want to go or wherever I come from, when I am in Sofia, how it is to be for the airlines that are operating, for example, your competitors' platforms, to interoperate onto the SITA platform as well, which will be managing Sofia Airport, because that's really important. Yeah, again, we have all the connectors that are needed. We are used to doing these kind of things. You know, just to take an example, we serve JFK Airport in New York, we serve Singapore, we serve all the airports, and the difficulties are very similar. And so we are easily making this possible because we have done that many, many times. Is there a possibility to upscale your solution in the future? Absolutely. We are heavily investing in our solutions, and artificial intelligence technologies, computer vision technologies, are bringing a lot of new capabilities to the systems, and therefore, this is just the beginning of a longer journey.