Indonesia adopts a new system to create « Intelligent Airports »

This year, in April, the Indonesia’s state-owned airport operator, PT Angkasa Pura signed a Memorandum of Cooperation with SITA to provide IT solutions in its airports in order to create and develop new “Intelligent Airport’s”.

PT Angkasa Pura is an Indonesian state company, under the control of the ministry of Indonesian Transport, in charge of the exploitation of airports. It owns two entities:

- PT Angkasa Pura I (created in 1964), which operates 13 airports

- PT Angkasa Pura II (created in 1984), which operates 12 airports

SITA (Société Internationale de Télécommunications Aéronautiques) is the world’s leading specialist in air transport communications and IT solutions. The company delivers and manage business solutions for airline airport, GDS, government all over the world. It has around 4.500 employees worldwide and provides services to over 550 members and 3.200 customers.

The first airport from the PT Angkasa Pura’s portfolio, which will be quipped with the new SITA services, will be the International Terminal at Ngurah Rai Airport, which is the most foreign tourist arrival in Indonesia. Those IT solutions will help the airport to provide new passengers services with the latest technology using real-time information.

The service provided by SITA will be focus on business intelligence, infrastructure and operational efficiency. To make this implementation more efficient, SITA will work with both the airlines present in the airport and the airport operator.

The new services provided by SITA will be, Aircom services (aircraft communications links for pilot, air-ground communications), new check-in kiosks, luggage tracking network, Wi-Fi networks or Applications Service Providers solutions.

The objective fixed by PT Angkasa Pura to SITA is to complete the all installation before Indonesia hosts the Asia Pacific Co-operation summit in Bali.

Those articles are based on the interview of Tommy Soetomo (President Director of PT Angkasa Pura) and Damian Hickey (Regional Vice-President South Asia and India of SITA). Those testify, show the synergy created by both company in order to provide new intelligent services to customers.

Wedding buzz

This time we decided to change the topic from serious meetings and conferences to less serious and more romantic event – wedding. And not just any wedding but exclusive and recently most discussed wedding of William and Kate. This girl is demn lucky to become a princess, and even both of us are a bit jealous, the topic of this post is different. We found a lovely article about the buzz in social media that this even has generated.

Special statistics agency Webtrend calculated the number of posts that were related to this wedding and the hard figures showed that this event is more discussed than earthquake in Japan and situation in Egypt. If you think that only English people are buzzing about royal family you should check this out, 65% of posts are coming from US and only 20% from UK. Well, probably these figures did not take into account the population of the countries and internet penetration, and it will be interesting to see them in proportional weight. Another very interesting statistics concerned what type of social media was used and we can see that Twitter is leading (911 000 tweets), followed by Facebook (217 000 status updates) and blogs (145 000 blog posts plus ours).

We can see that these types of events are very important in hospitality industry as thousands of people are coming to UK to see the wedding with their own eyes and become part of this historic event. This bring economic value to the city of London in terms of hotel nights, flights, restaurant bills, but also a lot of people are buying souvenirs to make this day memorable for them. Social media buzz just preheat interest towards such events. Even though event organizers and local tourism industry players are not the initiators of the internet buzz, they are the ones that highly profit from it. So this becomes another very illustrative example of social media importance in event and hospitality.