The days of fumbling around for your boarding pass or frantically checking in for a flight on the way to the airport could soon be over under imminent plans to overhaul the way we travel.
The International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO), the UN body responsible for crafting airline policy, plans to dramatically shake up existing rules for airports and airlines through the introduction of a “digital travel credential”.
This would allow passengers to store passport information on their devices to be used for travel. The changes could come into effect within three years, according to the Times.
Currently, those flying must check in, which can be done online or at the airport upon arrival. They are then issued with a boarding pass with a barcode. This is scanned by a passenger at various points throughout the airport, including at the gate before boarding.
The changes would make boarding passes and the need to check in for flights obsolete. Instead, flyers will download a “journey pass” to their phone when they book a flight. The pass will be automatically updated if any changes are made to the booking.
Passengers will also be able to upload their passports to their phone and travel through airports using their face for verification. Instead of manually checking in, which would let airlines know who intends to board their flights, airlines will instead be alerted when passengers arrive at the airport and their face is scanned.
Valérie Viale, the director of product management at Amadeus, a travel technology company, told the Times that the changes were “the biggest in 50 years”. She said: “The last upgrade of great scale was the adoption of e-ticketing in the early 2000s. The industry has now decided it’s time to upgrade to modern systems that are more like what Amazon would use.”
Infrastructure upgrades at airports, including facial recognition technology and the ability to read a passport from a mobile device, would be needed for the plans to be carried out successfully.
“Many airline systems haven’t changed for more than 50 years because everything has to be consistent across the industry and interoperable,” said Viale.
The new technology could spark privacy concerns but Amadeus said it had developed a system where passengers’ details are wiped within 15 seconds of each contact with a “touchpoint” – such as the pre-security gates.
How delays and connecting flights are handled could also change. Under the technology being developed, passengers who miss connecting flights due to delays out of their control could automatically be sent a notification on their phones with details of their new onward flight. Their journey pass would automatically update and they would be allowed to board the new flight.
“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.”
