Melbourne Airport, at present Australia’s second busiest, is aiming to overhaul Sydney to turn out to be the nation’s primary vacation spot airport.

For Melbourne Airport CIO Anthony Tomai and his workforce, that general strategic goal fuels their strategy to create and ship tech innovation on the airport campus at Tullamarine, northwest of the town.

“The vision is to become Australia’s favourite airport destination,” he says. “Technology has a key element in that broader corporate strategy in that last year was the first time we embedded technology as part of our corporate scorecard. The team and I pulled together a technology strategy focused on enabling the corporate strategy.”

Melbourne Airport has been connecting Victoria to the world for 50 years, and December 2023 was the airport’s busiest month for the reason that Covid-19 pandemic, with a complete of over three million passengers. And these numbers are anticipated to develop to about 76 million by 2042. Key to that is development of a 3rd runway. Currently, 45 planes take off and land per hour and this new runway may take the airport as much as 90 planes per hour. In addition, the Melbourne Airport Rail, connecting the airport to the suburban community, topic to approvals, is anticipated to be delivered by 2029.

Tomai and the workforce are liable for a variety of operations on the airport, together with operational know-how in addition to company IT.

“The technology operation here is quite expansive in that we manage all facets of traditional enterprise IT,” he says. “The main bit that has a lot more focus is the operational technology, and that’s everything from a kiosk to print your boarding pass and a bag tag, to the auto bag drop technology, which takes your bag from the conveyor at check-in to the plane. All of that operational technology is supported by my team.”