SITA - Air Transport Communication and IT solutions.

Hangzhou International Airport, one of China's top ten busiest airports, today announced that SITA has been chosen to provide the check-in and passenger processing technology which will enable its growth from 15 million to 25.6 million passengers by 2015.

Eric Wong, CEO, Hangzhou International Airport, said: "Hangzhou International Airport is building a regional aviation hub in the Yangtze River delta area through our Phase II Expansion Plan. The new international Terminal 2 will be in service this month, while the second runway and the new domestic Terminal 3 will be completed in the first half of 2012. The airport will have annual capacity of 25.6 million passengers, 0.5 million tons of cargo, and 260,000 flight departures and arrivals by 2015. We hope that our expansion will encourage more airlines to come here.

"Cooperating with SITA in the deployment of an international standard passenger boarding platform and top passenger processing technologies, helps us to innovate and strengthen our global links.

"There are 13 international and domestic airlines running routes between Hangzhou and East Asia, Southeast Asia as well as Hong Kong, Macau and Taiwan. KLM starts flying this week between Hangzhou and Amsterdam which is the first non-stop route between Zhejiang province and Europe."

The implementation of SITA AirportConnect at Hangzhou involves the management of more than 75 common use check-in workstations and the departure control system in the international terminal. SITA will also support baggage management, the operational database and an integrated security access system.

Francesco Violante, CEO, SITA, said: "This project is a strategically important step in developing the regional airport market in China. SITA is very pleased to be a part of it and to see our technology being adopted now outside the major international gateways such as Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou where we have already successfully deployed AirportConnect.

"AirportConnect established its reputation as a robust and efficient check-in platform during the 2008 Olympic Games when it handled a new daily record of 260,000 passengers at Beijing Capital International Airport (BCIA). Our goal now is to support the spread of the latest passenger processing technology right across the Tier 2 regional airport market."

SITA AirportConnect is a CUPPS (Common Use Passenger Processing System) compliant platform which enables airlines to share the infrastructure at the airport. CUPPS is the new check-in and boarding standard adopted by the air transport industry and SITA's AirportConnect is the only fully-integrated common use platform supporting CUPPS, CUTE, and web-based applications, as well as CUSS kiosk applications.