Giovanni Bisignani

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Giovanni Bisignani is the Director General of the International Air Transport Association, appointed in 2002.

Bisignani is the former chairman of Italy's flagship airline Alitalia. He is a graduate of Harvard Business School, and has worked as a senior executive at General Electric.

Bisignani is the chief proponent of the campaign for airlines to adopt radio frequency identification devices for checked baggage, to reduced the incidence of lost airfreight baggage items. While IATA as an organization is very supportive of the use of RFID carriers continue to be skeptical after many years of investigation. Primary reasons for this resistance are the higher costs of RFID tags versus bar coded tags and the insignificant improvement in RFID tag read rates versus bar-coded tags. Carriers question if the reduced mishandles will offset the added costs of the RFID tags. Bisignani is also an advocate of e-tickets, shorter flight routes, and increased competition between airlines. He has turned the IATA into a lobbyist of governments on airline issues, moving it away from its initial (and now obsolete) role as a cartel of airlines.