Indian fliers quick to embrace new technologies: SITA survey

Fliers in India are proving no exception when it comes to embracing new and emerging technologies or keeping pace with them along with the rest of the world even as it brings with it the security challenge of cyber attacks, according to an industry survey.
As per the survey, airlines in India plan to be 100 per compliant on IATA's baggage tracking resolution by 2019 besides 60 per cent of the Indian airports are planning to put in place a system to predict disruptions and its impact in the next three years.
The survey, "2016 Air Transport Industry Insight: India IT Treends benchmark," was released by the Geneva-based global leader in air transport solution provider SITA at its ICT forum in Goa last week.

According to the survey, 75 per cent of Indian carriers are at early planning stage of acquiring cyber security capability while 40 per cent of all airlines in India are planning to invest resources in new distribution capability (NDC) by 2019.
Noting that currently, India is a long way behind global levels of self bag-drop implementations, the survey stated that over the next few years this rate is expected to accelerate and exceed the global average.
"By 2019, over 80 per cent of airports expect to put in place an assisted self bag-drop system. This will support the roll out plans of airlines, all of which expect to offer assisted self bag drop services on major domestic routes during this time frame," it said.

A key enabler for driving high adoption of self-service bag-drop is kiosks that can print bag tags. Today, around two-thirds of Indian airports have kiosks that can do this, well above the global level.

However, despite the widespread availability, passenger usage of kiosks for printing bag tags is only 19 per cent, on par with the global usage level, according to the survey trends.
Observing that self-service is clearly heading to a mobile-based future, both globally but particularly in India, the survey said that despite low penetration of smartphones among the general population in India, the penetration of mobile devices among the travelling population is very high.

According to the Passenger IT Trends survey, 98 per cent of Indian passengers carry at least one mobile device (smartphone, tablet, laptop) when they travel and 32 per cent carry all three, much higher than the global average.