Air passengers are expanding their use of mobile and touchless technologies as passenger traffic surges due to pent-up demand, SITA’s 2022 Passenger IT Insights research shows. The survey, conducted in the first quarter of 2022, reveals an increase in passenger use of mobile devices for booking, on board the airplane, and for bag collection in Q1 2022 compared to Q1 2020, while automated gates saw increases in adoption for identity control, boarding, and border control.
“The results clearly reflect the accelerated digitalization of air travel since the outbreak of the pandemic and passengers’ willingness to adopt technologies,” the SITA report said. SITA’s research also finds reduced technology adoption in the early stages of the journey (check-in, bag tag, and bag drop) in favor of manual processing. Uncertainty about health requirements and travel rules has likely led travelers to seek more staff interaction when starting the journey, the travel technology powerhouse said.
The survey shows that the more technology there is during travel, the happier passengers are. As many as 87% of passengers have positive emotions about identity control, up 11% from 2016; the same is true for 84% of passengers about bag collection (up 9%). These are also the areas where technology adoption has risen the most, driven by mobile and automated gates, with half of passengers now additionally receiving real-time information at bag collection on time until delivery.
Asked about comfort levels with biometric identification throughout the journey, passengers scored an average of almost 7.3 out of 10 (with 10 representing most comfortable), most likely reflecting their desire for ease of travel moving forward from the pandemic.
“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,” said David Lavorel, CEO of SITA. “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.”
As that recovery gathers pace, SITA’s Passenger IT Insights survey suggests that passengers intend to fly more from 2023 onwards than they did prior to the pandemic, anticipating averages of 2.93 flights per passenger per year for business, and 3.90 for leisure. When weighing up whether to fly or not, the main barriers are ticket prices, health risks, and geopolitical risks.
Passengers also consider sustainability before they choose to fly. Around half of passengers would value airports and airlines putting in place new IT solutions to support sustainability, such as monitoring airport environmental performance to reduce emissions and flight path optimization to reduce fuel burn. On the airport front, this initiative has overtaken green airport infrastructure for most valued since Q1 2020.
