Keeping up-to-date with the latest airport IT trends at Pula Airport

Pula Airport is relatively small, serving around 700,000 passengers in total in 2019. Being situated in Croatia, most of the passenger flow is seasonal as holidaymakers flood to the country in the summer months of July and August.

However, those passenger numbers are increasing. With passenger traffic more than doubling in the past four years (359,426 passengers in 2015 up to 728,526 in 2019) and with new and exciting initiatives being implemented in the airport sector to increase security and passenger flow, even small airports like Pula are interested to learn what some of the biggest trends in the sector are.

We spoke to Sasa Leveric, Head of IT Department at Pula Airport, at Airport IT & Security 2019 to see what projects the airport is currently implementing as well as what he thinks the biggest trends are in airport IT right now and why it’s so important to keep informed on them.

What projects are you currently undertaking at Pula Airport?

We’re a small airport in Croatia, with most of our passenger traffic coming through in the summer months so we do not have any big projects happening right now. We’re trying to build things up slowly, so we are planning to build two more gates soon. We also want to build up our IT initiatives. 

I am responsible for IT at the airport and we are seeing what’s happening in the industry so we know what the biggest trends in IT are going to be as well as the technologies airports are currently using and what the exciting new technologies will be. We are mainly looking to the bigger airports to learn from them.

So far what have you learned from the bigger airports? What do you think are the biggest trends in airport IT right now? 

Baggage handling is one of the biggest trends right now. Actually, the general idea of a ‘digital transformation’ is interesting for us, so, scanning and security management are also big trends. Security is very important when discussing new digital initiatives.

Do you think the subjects of IT and security should be intertwined?

My colleague, Viktor, is a security manager and we learn about the newest initiatives together so we can implement new initiatives that complement each other. One cannot work without the other, especially in regards to cyber-security and data privacy with GDPR.

Why do you feel it is important to learn about new IT initiatives? 

IT is normal today, we use it every day in our day-to-day lives. Without IT we couldn’t have an airport system. IT tools help businesses and they help to make businesses better. So IT initiatives need to be deployed.

However, you can only implement these new initiatives if you have the money to do so. It’s a circle because, without IT, the business doesn’t work as well, but then you need the business to do well and have the money to implement new initiatives in the first place. This is a normal aspect of business so it’s important to be continuously learning and find out what the new technologies are before you invest in them.