VIEWPOINT: Coordination, not innovation, will define the future of travel

Sumesh Patel. Picture what flying could feel like: arrive at the airport, walk to the gate, board, collect your bag at the other end. No queues. No document checks at every turn. Not because any one system got smarter, but because every system that touches your journey, check-in, security, the airline, the border agency, finally agreed to talk to each other in real time. That version of travel is not a distant fantasy. Every piece of it already exists somewhere today. What has been missing is the will to connect them. Airlines are already doing what is expected. According to SITA’s 2025 Air Transport IT Insights report, 63% now use AI in operations control to manage disruption, aircraft assignment, and crew availability. In Asia Pacific, 98% of airlines use AI in some form, the highest adoption of any region in the world. The technology is not the problem anymore. The problem, the same research shows, is that 49% of airlines still name data integration as their biggest barrier to scaling AI further. This pattern shows up across the industry: significant investment in intelligence, and comparatively little in the plumbing that lets that intelligence act. An airline’s AI can predict a delayed connection perfectly and still fail the passenger, not because the prediction was wrong, but because that prediction never reached the other systems that needed to act on it in time. This is not a technology gap. It is a coordination gap, and closing it matters more than any single new tool the industry adopts this year.  (PHOTO: SITA) This already works. It just isn’t connected None of this is hypothetical. When a flight is delayed and a connection is at risk, AI can already flag the issue, reroute the bag, alert ground staff, and update the passenger, before the disruption cascades. When a security lane gets congested, AI can open a new one automatically. When a passenger with reduced mobility arrives at the gate, AI can dispatch a wheelchair before anyone has to ask. These are not concepts. They are running today at some of the world’s major airports. Data is what makes each of them possible. When operational information moves cleanly between airlines, airports, ground handlers, and border agencies, AI can act on it in real time. When it doesn’t, and too often it doesn’t, coordination slows and the passenger absorbs the delay.  The new majority is asking for technology that works together Aviation is growing faster than most people realize, and where that growth is coming from matters. Global passenger demand grew 5.3% in 2025, with Asia Pacific leading all regions at 10.9% international traffic growth. The average traveler is not flying more often than before. The growth is coming from first-time flyers, digital natives who have grown up with ride-hailing apps, instant delivery tracking, and payments that just work, and who have never known anything but connected digital experiences. SITA’s Passenger IT Insights report, which surveyed more than 7,500 passengers worldwide, captures what this new majority wants: simplicity, trust, and sustainability. Their top ask is shorter wait times. Their second is a single ticket covering the entire journey, across air, rail, and road. Neither is a request for a new gadget. Both are requests for the systems that already exist to stop working in isolation. That is not a preference. It is an expectation, and it is the same coordination problem, seen from the passenger’s side of the counter. One identity, every touchpoint Biometric identity is where the coordination argument becomes visible to the passenger. A single scan can already replace a document check. The harder problem, and the one that matters, is getting every system along the journey, check-in, bag drop, security, boarding, immigration, to recognize the same passenger without asking them to prove it again at each stop. That is not a technology limitation. Airports and airlines already have the tools. It is a question of whether those systems talk to each other. APAC is leading the way on both fronts. The share of passengers who have never used biometrics dropped from 41% in 2024 to 31% in 2025 in a single year, and 62% would now actively choose a biometric checkpoint over a traditional border counter. Passengers are not just tolerating this technology. They are choosing it, and asking for more of it: 79% are comfortable storing their passport on their phone, and 78% are happy to share their digital identity and biometrics ahead of travel. The demand is no longer the constraint. The constraint is coordination: 54% of airports globally have live biometric border control today, a figure expected to reach 83% by 2028, and 64% of airlines plan to move to airline-issued digital identity credentials, nearly double the share from a year ago. The direction is set. APAC and the Middle East are setting the pace. (PHOTO: SITA) Baggage: the same gap, in numbers Baggage makes the coordination argument in dollars. According to SITA’s 2026 Baggage IT Insights Report, mishandling rates fell 23% in 2025 to 4.9 bags per 1,000 passengers, dropping below pre-pandemic levels for the first time, even as global passenger volumes hit a record 5 billion. That progress happened because more of the handoffs between airline, ground handler, and airport now share data in real time. Where that handoff still breaks, the cost is steep: the industry absorbs $6.3 billion a year in mishandling, at $260 per bag on average. Airline net profit runs at roughly $8 per passenger, so one mishandled bag can erase the profit from more than 30 seats sold. Asia Pacific shows what happens when that handoff works. The region already records the lowest mishandling rate globally, at 3.41 bags per 1,000 passengers, and the lowest cost per bag at $210, well below the global average. That advantage is not incidental. It is the dividend of newer airports built with connected systems from the start. The next gains are coming from linking passenger-facing tools directly into that same data layer. Integrating Apple Find My and Google Find Hub into airline recovery systems cut permanently lost bags by 90% in the first year alone. Thai Airways compressed a three-minute bag reflighting task into one second per bag across nine airports using SITA’s automation tools. None of this required new hardware. It required the systems to share what they already knew. Singapore’s Changi Airport is a leader in employing technology. (PHOTO: Shutterstock) APAC: highest ambition, widest gap Asia Pacific is not just growing faster than any other aviation market. It drives more than half of the world’s new passenger traffic, and its passengers already fly more than anyone else, averaging 4.4 flights a year. It is also running the coordination gap this piece describes at its most extreme: the highest AI adoption of any region, and only 21% of airlines sharing operational data with partners. That gap, real ambition without the connective layer to match it, is the same gap driving everything above. Here it is just measured at its widest point. The physical build-out backing that ambition is real and moving fast: airport-rail links under construction in Kuala Lumpur, Hong Kong, and Seoul, single-ticket air-rail itineraries already live in Korea, and growing integration between aviation and maritime transport across the region. 45% of APAC passengers now book multiple intermodal trips, against 31% in Europe and the Americas. None of that infrastructure closes the gap on its own. A rail link only helps a passenger if the train actually knows their flight is late and holds the connection for them, and that is a data problem, not a construction one. Close it at the same pace the region is pouring concrete, and APAC does not just keep growing fastest. It becomes the template everyone else copies. (IMAGE: Shutterstock) The next leap isn’t a technology. It’s an agreement. None of this arrives through a single vendor or a single product. It arrives when the industry stops treating passenger data as a competitive asset each company holds alone and starts treating it as shared infrastructure, information that exists for the journey, not for whichever company happens to be holding it. By 2050, the goal will not be a nicer airport. It will be an airport the passenger barely notices, because the system is navigating them, AI is orchestrating the handovers, and their identity is following them across every mode of transport without being asked to prove it again. Sustainability is not added to that picture afterward. It is built into every decision along the way. We already have the technology. We already have the data. We already have passengers asking for exactly this. What is missing is the coordination to bring it together, and for the next billion of them boarding for the first time, that is not aspiration. It is the job in front of us. Note: Sumesh Patel is President Asia Pacific for SITA. 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