SITA, AA trial new passenger location system
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Aviation IT company SITA is trialling a new Apple-based solution aimed at helping airlines communicate with their passengers at airports.
American Airlines will become the first carrier to use the SITA Common-use Beacon Registry, which uses Apple’s iBeacon technology to send information to passengers’ mobile devices.
Using Bluetooth, the solution sends location-based information to passengers’ smartphones as they move through the airport. This will enable airlines to provide passengers with directions, walking times, boarding alerts and other information.
“As we worked with airlines across the world including American Airlines at DFW and San Francisco International, and others at London Heathrow Airport, Shanghai Hongqiao International Airport and Copenhagen Airport, we saw very quickly that an industry approach was needed,” Jim Peters, SITA’s chief technology officer said at the Air Transport IT Summit.
“We have launched the SITA Common-use Beacon Registry to give the industry a single point of contact for common-use beacons deployed at any airport around the world. With it, airports can control and share the meta data – the exact location including information on gates, terminals, etc – with airlines and other partners and allow passengers to receive accurate and relevant information.”
The pilot programme with AA at Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport (DFW) is the world’s biggest airport deployment of beacons to date. Over the summer, the airline plans to roll out the programme to other airports in North America.
“Beacons provide a fantastic opportunity to improve the passenger experience, but to do so they must be consistently deployed at all airports,” said Phil Easter, AA’s director of mobile apps
“At American Airlines we are working with SITA to use beacon location detection to enhance our mobile app and give our passengers travelling through the airports accurate way-finding information. Using SITA’s Registry will enable us to provide the same great user experience to our passengers using our app in airports not just in North America, but across our global route network.”
SITA says its Common-use Beacon Registry will be designed in such a way that radio-emitting devices do not disrupt each other’s signals or existing Wi-Fi infrastructure.
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