Case Study: Istanbul Airport achieves faster bag transfers with SITA

Automation helps iGA Istanbul deliver faster bag transfers

iGA Istanbul Airport, one of Europe’s major connecting hubs, needed to manage rapidly growing passenger and baggage volumes while meeting a critical SLA with Turkish Airlines: connecting transfer bags from arriving to departing flights within 60 minutes. To support this, the airport used SITA Bag Message to manage and reconcile baggage flow in real time.

SITA helped iGA Istanbul Airport automate baggage handling by using bag message data to identify transfer bags quickly and prioritize short-connection transfers. The result has been one of the fastest bag transfer times globally, with average connection times of 20 minutes and as low as 10 minutes during peak recovery, while the airport can manage around 10,000 bags per hour and has capacity for double that volume.

Istanbul Airport

İlker Çelepçikay

Head of Baggage