Pent-up demand for air journey, with passengers embracing mobile and touchless technologies

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SITA’s 2022 Passenger IT Insights analysis highlights pent-up demand for each enterprise and leisure journey rising from the pandemic, with passengers additional embracing mobile and touchless technologies to make the journey as handy and seamless as doable.

The survey reveals a rise in passenger use of mobile units for reserving, on board the airplane, and for bag assortment in Q1 2022 in comparison with Q1 2020, whereas automated gates noticed will increase in adoption for id management, boarding, and border management.

The outcomes clearly replicate the accelerated digitalization of air journey because the outbreak of the pandemic and passengers’ willingness to undertake technologies. However, well being verification is a ache level that has slowed end-to-end automation. In Q1 2022, regardless of some uptake of expertise at this stage, over half of passengers have been nonetheless doing their very own analysis on well being verification necessities and manually submitting documentation. SITA’s analysis additionally finds diminished expertise adoption within the early levels of the journey (check-in, bag tag, and bag drop) in favour of handbook processing. Uncertainty about well being necessities and journey guidelines has possible led travellers to hunt extra workers interplay when beginning the journey.

The survey reveals that the extra expertise there may be throughout journey, the happier passengers are. As many as 87% of passengers have optimistic feelings about id management, up 11% from 2016; the identical is true for 84% of passengers about bag assortment (up 9%). These are additionally the areas the place expertise adoption has risen probably the most, pushed by mobile and automated gates, with half of passengers now moreover receiving real-time info at bag assortment on time till supply.

David Lavorel, CEO, SITA, stated: “It is exciting to see demand recovering and even surpassing pre-pandemic levels, not just for leisure but also for business travel. We are seeing that the technology-driven end-to-end passenger journey is becoming a reality, as the air transport community continues to digitalize its travel processes and industry operations, accelerated by the pandemic. We are also seeing that passengers are increasingly embracing mobile and touchless technologies across the journey, to make their travel as convenient and seamless as possible. The use of IT to help drive and sustain the recovery of air travel is vital today, and it is also critical to the post-pandemic digital journey of tomorrow.”

The publish Pent-up demand for air travel, with passengers embracing mobile and touchless technologies appeared first on Travel Daily.