Tony Tyler has drawn the lines at the SITA Air Transport IT Summit in 2012 of how the future should look like from the perspective of IATA and has sent a clear message: Big Changes are to come.

Often change is painfully slow even when there is an acknowledgement that it is needed. We see that being played out in Europe, where two decades after the concept was developed, the Single European Sky (SES) still remains largely a theoretical construct. Everybody accepts that the existing system is hugely inefficient and ill-equipped to cope with today’s traffic numbers, much less tomorrow’s. Certainly that it is the view of EC Vice President and Transport Commissioner Siim Kallas, but the European states and their air navigation service providers (ANSPs) are not delivering. Thus, Tyler defends a top-down approach from the Commission, with some painful penalties to force change among ANSPs and states.

When change is focused on industry, we have a better track record of delivering quickly. Especially the monumental leap forward represented by 100% e-ticketing. It was a central component of IATA’s Simplifying the Business (StB) program. And it would not have occurred if we hadn’t achieved a common vision across the value chain of the benefits it would bring.

But where clearly there is no a common vision is regarding the use of IT to Distribution, Decision Support and Operational Efficiency. Let´s see each of them:

Distribution: New Distribution Capability

When they were developed, beginning in the 1960s, the computer reservations systems—forerunners of today’s GDSs—represented a step change in airline efficiency and customer convenience, making possible a sales system that put airlines decades ahead of other consumer-facing industries.Today, GDSs help airlines to sell 60% of their tickets. They are among the most important partners for airlines in the distribution value chain.

But the airline industry of today is very different from the industry of the 1970’s. Fares and schedule displays on green screens were all that was needed or expected in those days. That is no longer the case. The product offering is much wider with growing options through unbundling. And the GDS model, in Tyler´s words, is holding airlines back from shaping the customer focus of tomorrow. New models, more retail-based, are facilitating customer-friendly interactions in almost every other consumer online activity. But the decades old GDS model is too clunky to adapt easily to the emergence of trends such as fare unbundling and merchandizing.

IATA, with the full support of their Board of Governors, is working on a new distribution standard that could revolutionize distribution capabilities by bringing the airlines up to date with online retailers and they expect to complete the foundation standard definition later this year. The new distribution capability will be an open standard that can be used by any party, including GDSs. The intent is to enable product differentiation through all distribution channels.

Beyond setting the standards, IATA will support the implementation, in collaboration with the entire value chain, through a roadmap and an industry business case. IATA will also provide the infrastructure, in terms of data models and messaging format, enabling the adoption of the standards in the industry.

Tyler believes that the GDSs and system providers, including SITA, have an important role to play in working with airlines to optimize this New Distribution Capability (NDC) and to take advantage of the opportunities it will offer them.

Decision Support: Direct Data Service

Every minute of every day, airlines are faced with a multitude of operational and commercial decisions for which they rely on IT to help arrive at the correct answer. Crew-pairing and scheduling, managing irregular operations, finding the most fuel-efficient routings, allocating the scarce resource of airport gates—all of these tasks have been rendered far more manageable through the application of IT by our partners.

Perhaps surprisingly, given the value that is attached to it, Tyler remarks that airlines have not been as wise as they should have been in understanding how important it is for an industry to manage the information it has about its customers’ travel patterns. Instead, they have allowed much of that information to reside with the middlemen distributors of our product, who have made a healthy profit aggregating and selling back to airlines their own booking data. That is why Tyler remarks the importance of IATA’s Direct Data Service (DDS), launched in partnership with ARC in North America.

DDS is a more powerful evolution of IATA’s PaxIS business intelligence tool. The understanding of travel patterns facilitated by PaxIS, which uses actual airline tickets captured through the IATA Billing and Settlement Plan and ARC, is already helping airlines, airports, governments, and tourism businesses among other customers. In addition to what is provided in the PaxIS product, DDS will also offer direct sales data for airlines that have chosen to provide this. DDS will bring fresh competition into the market for passenger data.

Operational Efficiency: Fast Travel and Checkpoint of the Future

Tyler explains that IATA´s Fast Travel is made up by six Fast Travel projects cover: self-check in; self-bag tag; self-scanning of travel documents such as passports; flight rebooking; self-boarding and the ability to report a missing bag online.

As of 19 June 2012, 35 airport/airline pairs have implemented the three mandatory Fast Travel projects. We have shown Fast Travel works, but to move forward IATA is focused on bringing benefits to as many passengers as quickly as possible. So the target for 2012 is for 100 airline/airport pairs using at least three Fast Travel solutions. Our 2020 vision is for 80% of global passengers to be offered a complete self-service suite.

Another IATA initiative to use technology to make life easier for our customers involves the security process is Checkpoint of the Future project, which will combine information about passengers already provided for immigration purposes and advanced detection technology to enable passengers to enjoy a seamless journey through the checkpoint without unpacking or removing clothes.

Each of these 3 points will have to face different obstacles, from private and public sector, as suppose to change the status quo. Let´s hope that the final result help to shape the best scenario for the travellers