A digital travel pass could soon replace the need for physical boarding passes and even for any check-in at all, if proposals from the UN’s airline policy body go ahead. The International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) is introducing what The Times is calling aviation’s “biggest shake-up in 50 years”.
The new rules would mean passengers can store passport details on their electronic devices and that when they book a flight, a “journey pass” would be downloaded to their phone. The system would replace the need for a physical check-in process at the airport and remove the hassle in case of delays or re-bookings when the “digital travel credential” would be automatically updated to reflect any new travel itinerary information.
Infrastructure upgrades required
For the technology to function, some airports would need infrastructure upgrades ensuring that the necessary facial recognition and mobile device readers were installed. The Spanish travel tech multinational Amadeus is already putting itself forward to become the go-to solution provider for the UK.
“We’re talking about British Airways, we’re discussing with Heathrow airport, we’re discussing with Gatwick. We are present in all of these touch points,” director of product management Valérie Viale told The Times. “The last upgrade of great scale was the adoption of e-ticketing in the early 2000s,” she noted. “The industry has now decided it’s time to upgrade to modern systems that are more like what Amazon would use.”
Despite the privacy concerns that tend to accompany the spread of digitally-stored information, Amadeus says it has developed a system that will delete passengers’ details within 15 seconds of any contact with a security “touchpoint”.
Privacy concerns versus potential “free flow”
It is hoped the digital travel credential will help to make journeys smoother and more intuitive. “At the moment airlines have systems that are very siloed,” Viale said. “There’s the reservation system that, when check-in opens, makes a handshake with a delivery system and says ‘here are my reservations, you can now deliver them’. In the future, it’ll be far more continuous and the journey pass will be dynamic.”
In the words of Amadeus president of travel, Decius Valmorbida: “Biometric touch points essentially will grant you access to where you need to go next. You don’t even need to have gates – you could have a free flow. As you walk through the hallways with cameras, they are scanning your face, and that is providing the information if you are allowed to be going to that direction.”
But will UN plans to bring the system online within three years come to fruition? Valmorbida says: “We project that in the next seven to eight years, all airports are going to be equipped with this. The part that is probably moving a bit slower than what we expected is – as always – every government that is looking into creating their own standard.” As a result, Valmorbida predicts the tech will be available worldwide “in the next decade for sure.”
