COUNCIL PRESIDENT'S STATEMENT

The promise of a healthier future

After an extraordinary few years, passenger demand is returning swiftly, bringing the promise of a healthier future for airlines, airports and other travel community players. As a community, we must now focus sharply on solving the capacity constraints and congestion we sometimes face. We must rise to the challenges and deliver on the opportunities provided by technology transformation to address the current and future requirements of everyone in our industry.

Technology is showing the way forward. Across the air transport industry – and indeed throughout the wider travel industry – CIOs see digital transformation as critical to preparing for the future of travel, helping us to meet pressing needs, while improving our operational excellence, by being more flexible, efficient and agile.

We saw the accelerated digitalization of aviation during COVID, including more demand for mobile-enabled touchless walk-through passenger processing, to ensure safe and smooth travel processes. SITA’s Air Transport IT Insights, released at the start of 2023, is clear proof of the industry’s continued determination to digitalize, confirming an increased focus on investment in digital technologies to meet issues, for both airlines and airports. This includes technologies to smooth the passenger experience and to help curb bottlenecks, in turn allowing the redistribution of staff resources to focus on more complex tasks.

The Council’s role and responsibilities

I was delighted to be re-elected as SITA Council President and I thank all Council Representatives for their continued faith in me. I remain committed to ensuring that the Council shares its knowledge and insights as SITA evolves. The Council sees the community’s desire to digitally shift as crucial to SITA’s raison d’être as a community provider and as a key partner in digitally enabling travel. SITA is committed to working closely with customers to this end; its portfolio is a leading enabler, be it through next-generation platforms that underpin the industry’s digital transformation, or through automating and digitalizing passenger processing and industry operations, on and off the airport, at the border, and around the aircraft.

Through SITA’s portfolio, the community is able to respond to new needs and challenges. The Council Representatives act collectively on behalf of our community to ensure this remains the case, as we help to determine SITA’s portfolio directions.

The Council continues to play an important role in other key areas, such as the selection of Board Director candidates through the participation of three Council Representatives on the Nomination Committee. We are also collaborating with SITA Management to drive enhancements to the operational activities of the SITA Service Desk.

Changes to the Council were implemented in 2022, including the new Council composition and our newly defined advisory role which has a primary focus on the SITA portfolio. In the first half of 2022 the formation of the new Council was finalized, and the Representatives were formally appointed at the Council meeting of 16 June 2022. The Council may be comprised of up to 20 Representatives coming from 10 Council Geographic Member Groups.

A portfolio for the future

The first meeting of the newly composed Council centered on understanding the Council’s new role and the mandate of its Representatives. It was also an opportunity to gain deeper insights into SITA’s portfolio capabilities, through an introduction to SITA’s four business units – Airports, Borders, Aircraft, and Communications & Data Exchange.

In December 2022, a successful and dynamic meeting of the Council took place and we continued to look closely at SITA solutions, with demonstrations from the Aircraft and Borders businesses, as well as hearing an assessment of the aviation industry by IATA Chief Economist Marie Owens Thomsen.

The initiative to provide deeper portfolio insights to the Council, through the involvement of management and specialists, will continue to increase awareness and recognition of the value of SITA’s portfolio. The use of case studies is proving beneficial, as they offer real-life examples of how SITA’s portfolio addresses specific issues, ensuring that solutions are understood and appreciated by key stakeholders.

What is clear from our discussions is that the industry’s accelerated digital transformation is critical to streamline passenger travel, making it convenient, touchless and walk-through, while also making operations efficient and cost-effective, coupled with the capabilities to respond with speed to fast emerging and evolving situations.

SITA’s solutions achieve this, being focused on collaboration, operational excellence and the seamless passenger journey, including automation and self-service, process optimization, operations sharing and outsourcing. They address market volatility through fast deployment, flexibility in use, and feature value-based pricing models to ensure agility in uncertain times.

This aligns well with the requirements of SITA’s members and customers. The Council will continue to play its vital role of contributing to the development of SITA’s portfolio of air transport industry products and solutions.

Making digital travel a reality

That brings me to the SITA Council Awards. Given the Council’s role in helping to shape the development of SITA’s portfolio, it is fitting that the Council judges award nominations for projects that address member and community challenges as we continue to embrace a digital future. We saw 19 Council Award nominations submitted during 2022 from SITA teams all over the world, for projects covering services, products or solutions, implementations, or Proofs-of-Concept.

Given the increased drive to digitalize travel processes and operations, ‘Making digital travel a reality’ was the category chosen for the awards. When narrowing down the entries to a shortlist of six, the judges considered how the projects enable easier travel, passenger convenience, sustainability, agility, cost effectiveness and efficiency – with complementary criteria including understanding the customer, SITA’s community role, and cross-team and industry collaboration.

As always, it was a closely-run race, so choosing the winner and runners up proved difficult. But at the Council meeting in December 2022, our winning vote went to the SITA digital baggage project with Lufthansa. The project reduces mishandled bag costs and improves the customer experience by digitally automating bag reflight operations. This is an ideal way to meet a critical need, especially in peak and busy periods, as we see soaring demand for flights. Now available to all, the solution, WorldTracer Auto Baggage Reflight, is a fully automated Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solution capable of re-flighting bags without any human intervention.

Three runners up all received equal votes, each demonstrating the relevance of SITA’s portfolio and innovations for the future. One was the ground-breaking trusted traveler credential trial with the Government of Aruba, enabling passengers to use one privacy-preserving digital app with a trusted and digital copy of their passport, while giving the arrival government the ability to pre-clear passengers for boarding. In the coming year, we will definitely be hearing more about this trial in the advance of digital travel.

SITA’s Digital Twin technology at Hamad International Airport was another a runner up. Winning the ‘Smart Solution of the Year’ award at the prestigious annual Qatar IT Business Awards in 2022, Hamad’s Digital Twin displays a 3D representation of systems and facilities to optimize maintenance and stand management, including information regarding wait times, queues, airline arrivals, weather, cleaning, and much more.

The other runner up was Singapore Airlines’ deployment of SITA OptiClimb® to reduce up to 15,000 tons of aircraft carbon emissions a year, with estimated fuel savings of up to 5% during climb-out on each flight. As a digital inflight prescriptive analytics tool for fuel optimization, SITA OptiClimb® will not only provide Singapore Airlines with significant cost savings, but will also greatly help support its sustainability program and commitment to net-zero carbon emissions by 2050.

The two other nominations that made the top six include a SITA project with Fraport AG Frankfurt Airport – also involving Star Alliance and NEC – addressing ‘any airport to anywhere’ digital travel. In addition, the top six included a significant move towards seamless intermodal travel with the introduction of SITA Flex Integration Services, which enhance the seamless journey experience and benefit passengers, airlines and other modal service providers such as rail, buses, cruise, and ferries. We anticipate that both of these projects will have an increasingly positive impact on the travel experience in the years ahead.

Better connected – the voice of SITA members

The Council Awards keep SITA and the Council Representatives engaged and connected with one another, combining insights and expertise. Part of SITA’s RISE transformation program (see the CEO Report) is to continuously maintain and enhance that level of connection and engagement.

To help drive the initiative, the President of each of SITA’s four Geographies met with Council Representatives within their respective Geography to re-energize the relationship and to encourage their role as Representatives of the members in their Council Geography group.

One of the outcomes from this engagement was the implementation of more active two-way communication between Representatives and SITA, which takes the form of a Microsoft Teams channel called ‘SITA Council – The Voice of the Members’. This is a first for SITA and the Council. In addition to that, the Membership Committee of the Council met regularly to handle the flow of matters impacting various SITA Members.

Thank you and looking ahead

Before I finish, I would like to thank all the SITA Council Representatives for their dedication, commitment and knowledge as the Council embraces its advisory role and brings further expertise and insights to the development of SITA’s portfolio. We offer grateful thanks to those whose term on the Council ended in 2022 – and we welcome all those Representatives who joined our new Council.

Let me also express my appreciation and gratitude to the SITA Board, SITA’s CEO, David Lavorel, his Executive team, the Shareholder Relations team, and SITA employees across the world, in particular those who liaise closely with the Council to share their portfolio insights. As I said earlier, I think we can all look forward to healthier years ahead, as well as important opportunities for SITA as it continues its drive to digitalize our air transport community.

SITA COUNCIL

Officially, all Council Representatives stepped down on 15 June 2022.
As part of the newly composed Council, 19 Representatives were formally appointed at the first meeting of the newly formed Council on 16 June 2022. We would like to thank all former Representatives and welcome all new Representatives.

SITA Council composition as of 31 December 2022.