São Paulo-Guarulhos International Airport (GRU Airport) and RIOgaleão – Tom Jobim International Airport (RIOgaleão) are the first airports in Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) to deploy SITA Flex to provide mobile passenger services to speed up check-in, bag drop and boarding. It forms part of a wider five-year contract awarded to global air transport IT provider, SITA, to renew the common-use services at the two airports.
Travel is rebounding fast in Brazil following the COVID-19 pandemic. According to IATA, domestic passenger volumes were up 133.3% year on year in April 2022. Brazil’s domestic passenger market is now the fourth largest in the world. It spells good news for the country’s economy hit hard by the pandemic. However, airlines and airports operating in Brazil will need to act quickly and in an agile way to cope with the travel surge and reduce airport bottlenecks.
GRU Airport and RIOgaleão are the two key airport operators in the region; respectively, they handled around 43 million passengers and 13.5 million passengers a year pre-pandemic, utilising SITA’s passenger processing technology. Carriers operating at GRU Airport and RIOgaleão can now leverage SITA Flex – an innovative next-generation common-use technology – to help speed up passenger processing as passenger volumes rebound.
SITA Flex better equips airports and airlines to meet the current challenges of capacity, resource constraints, and disruptions, as the cloud-based platform takes them beyond the limitations of traditional common-use infrastructure. Instead of fixed check-in counters or kiosks, for example, airlines and airports can deploy more mobile passenger services, such as roving agents on tablets or the ability for passengers to use their mobile phones to fully manage their travel. The SITA Flex application programming interface (API) architecture allows the adoption of existing and future passenger processing innovations, helping to future-proof airport operations.
