AVIOINTERVIEW: Sergio Colella, President of SITA Europe

Yeah, absolutely, and there is a lot to do. We have experienced, as you said, over summer a terrible passenger experience, a terrible customer experience, especially here in Europe. Over the pandemic, more than 2 million jobs have been lost in the aviation industry. Now the good news is that traffic is back and the appetite from passengers, from customers, is high to get back and fly. How can we adapt quickly to this new demand? The fact is that digital can do a lot to enable a seamless passenger journey, to make sure that you don't wait hours queuing for security, to facilitate passenger flows, to enable a better passenger journey. What technologies are we talking about? We are talking about biometrics, about computer vision, about business intelligence technologies that allow you to get to the airport and your face becomes your boarding pass, your face becomes even your passport, and your smartphone in your pocket is the remote controller of the journey. You have all the information that you need, you can control where your baggage is, you have useful information to guide you through the airport. This is the principle and the objectives of what we are building. Technologies are available, and a very practical example is just to board a plane through biometric gates instead of manual control — it's 40% faster. So imagine how an airport can be seamless when your face allows you to pass every kind of controls. So that's the first element. The second element is to allow for productivity. We will have for a long time less people in the airport. Heathrow needs to hire more than 10,000 people, Schiphol needs to hire 20,000 people, and it's very difficult to attract talent and people again into our industry. So we need to do more with less, and here we're talking about automation, about robotics, about self-service capabilities that enable to operate smoothly an airport and an airline with a little bit less people. Finally, we need to become a sustainable industry, and that was today and yesterday really a hot topic for the IATA Congress. Enabling technologies that allow to optimize the flight, to reduce the taxi time, to optimize the climbing and descend phases of an aircraft bring up to 10% of kerosene consumption reduction, which means up to 10% of carbon emission reduction. All of this is what we have on the table to build the aviation of tomorrow.

You're raising two very important points. The first point is about making sure that the use of technology keeps the privacy and the security of the data. This is of paramount importance. We have a very strong regulation of global data protection, so the so-called GDPR regulations that are really very strict, and we implement those regulations very strictly. This allows the passenger, first of all, to give his or her consent to the utilization of the data, to give consent to go through a biometric gate for instance, so that if you are not comfortable, you will not do it. And anyhow, the data after the travel is destroyed, and we really are keen to have a very secure data privacy regulation applied. So that's very important. But by the way, when you use your smartphone and you unlock your smartphone with your face, or you allow for a bank transfer, you're already entering a biometrically enabled world. The technology is already there. It's the habit. And I think that COVID has had a role of a catalyst of the digitalization of our minds. We are more ready today to travel with our smartphone with all the data inside than we were three years ago. We're now much more integrated into the whole ecosystem.

Yeah, we need to do it before others will do it for our industry and will disrupt us. The second part of your question is equally important. It's really talking about the ecosystem, and you mentioned the example of the cargo industry. We can enlarge that to the multimodality, allowing the passenger to have a seamless passenger experience from the train to the plane, just to take an example. You want to go from, I don't know, Bordeaux to New York — you will have a part of the travel that will be by train and the second part of the travel from Paris to New York that will be by plane. We need to have a seamless passenger experience, a unique ticket. This goes as well for travelers that will use plane and ships one day. This goes up to the future of urban air mobility — we spoke about flying drones. So all of this, and not just in the air but also on the ground, as you mentioned, you can rent now electric vehicles that are self-operated or whatever. The future holds everything in store.

Yeah, absolutely. And you know, as a consumer, we have been used in the last years to be always connected, to have really very easy-to-use services. Well, our industry, aviation, needs to adapt to that and to provide seamless, always connected, easy-to-operate, stressless services for our customers.

Yes, you know, data is the new oil. So being able to manage the data, to have automated processes, to be able to really secure that we have at the same time a physical passenger experience and a digital passenger experience with a digital passport, digital travel credential, is key. We cannot cope and we cannot evolve without it. It requires a lot of digital experts, a lot of technologists that we need to attract. We need to give a sense of purpose to the new generations of workers, of IT specialists that need to really be attracted by our industry. Our industry was very sexy 30 years ago and it's probably a bit less sexy today.

We are as open as safety is concerned. So in our industry, the paramount priority is safety — safety of the travel, safety and security of the data, safety and security of the employees. So we are open, we use this kind of technologies, we work with startups, we work with partners in the industry that come from other industries, and we bring our aviation expertise to make sure that we do things that are improving the safety, the security, and the passenger experience. That's really the intent, and we are really leading edge, I think, in our company at SITA for the adaptation of the new technologies you have just mentioned to the aviation industry history.

No, I wouldn't think so. It's a very important point that I wanted to raise. Thank you very much.