Part of the Process

Leaving Athens Following on from my last trip to the SITA Summit in 2014  this year's SITA Forum in Athens had similar themes, but with a more airport focused audience. I think my biggest take away is that self-service is important ; not just as a method in cutting costs but also in improving the passenger experience ( #PaxEx ) via two main factors - control and information. Control To pick out the two salient illustrations of this, for control I'll turn to Patrice About from AirFrance. He made the point that consumer bag tracking devices now available for about $50, and these aren't under airline control or put in baggage with their knowledge. So the industry faces a choice - either find a way to work with passengers bring their own device or bury head in sand and have pax that are better informed than airline agents when a bag has been put on the wrong aircraft. This trend is happening now, the good news for airlines is that bag tag devices are GPS/sim based and m

Photo by Matt Cornock (flickr) I have been messing around with computers and first started writing simple code about 30 years ago. Since then I have gained a degree that contained a large "technical" component analysing and solving problems with code.  My professional code has been experienced by hundreds of millions of people from organising school transport for special needs children, overhauling part of the British rail infrastructure, supporting the programme management of a massive bank refurbishment in the UK to more recently supplying travellers around the word with tickets, information during disruption and the chance to feedback to their travel company. I have also written a content management system in one language that I didn't use professionally and some small open source utilities in another.  I don't list out these achievements to convince you of my ability as a programmer, far from it, at my best I was merely average. My code was never truly