Border control and lost baggage are the two remaining “pain points” when it comes to creating seamless air passenger journeys. But smart technology deployment and closer cooperation between airlines, airports and regulators could help resolve these issues and free up enough space to transform the future passenger experience at airports, industry executives suggested on a recent panel hosted by SITA and the Financial Times‘ global event arm, FT Live.

Technology can reduce border processing times by as much as 80% in airports, SITA chief executive David Lavorel said during the ‘Scaling Seamless Air Travel’ panel on 18 March. He said the hardest part of digitizing the border is “not so much the technology — it’s bringing all of the players together.”

Given the pace at which the air transport sector is growing, addressing the remaining pain points will be essential, added Lavorel, noting:

By 2040, we’re going to see a near-doubling of passenger volumes, and we need to accommodate that growth through technology and ensure we deliver a safe, reliable and seamless experience for passengers.

Kim Macauley, senior vice-president of IT and data at the International Air Transport Association (IATA), agrees that “technology is the easy part.” She said airlines are ready for digitization, but the issue is “how do we make sure that the rest of the individuals in the value stream are also coming on board…and accepting that we can trust this technology?”

Governments are “obviously” one of the key players needed to help drive a shift toward “having something that’s completely on your phone, [so] you don’t have to have your passport checked multiple times, which is frustrating from a customer experience perspective,” added Macauley.

Case study: Bangalore

One airport that has made strides in biometric-based, digitized passenger screening is Kempegowda International Airport Bengaluru (BLR Airport), where 50% of domestic travelers use their biometric ID to travel.

“They just turn up at the airport with their face and the face acts as their boarding pass,” said Hari Marar, managing director & CEO at Bangalore International Airport. To get to this point, however, it took years of trials to convince a skeptical government that the technology could be trusted.

“It took some time for the government to understand the benefits but, finally, what they rolled out is a very effective system that works very well,” explained Marar. “In our case, the big obstacle was to get the government convinced that this was a good thing to do.”

For Bangalore, which has seen annual passenger numbers increase from 8.5 million in its first year of operations — less than 20 years ago — to around 45 million today, digitization was essential. “We realized we could not build fast enough to keep up with this level of growth, so there had to be some intervention in terms of technology to help us process passengers faster.”

Bangalore is now trialing biometric-based seamless travel on an international scale to process passengers traveling to Doha in Qatar. The trial, which goes live this week, is a “proof of concept where digital credentials issued in Bangalore can be used in Doha and vice versa,” Marar said. He hopes this will help to develop a “global standard for digital identity interoperability.”

IATA’s Macaulay pointed out that IATA’s OneID initiative, which aims to streamline the passenger journey through a contactless process at the airport based on biometric-enabled identification, is “gaining massive traction.”

Creating space

In the future, if digitized border control becomes commonplace around the world, a huge amount of space that was previously used to process passengers in airports could be freed up to offer a range of different experiences aimed at enhancing journeys.

“Think about an airport that can process passengers just by you showing up and showing your face, and then you can totally reimagine the space,” urged Dusseldorf Airport chief executive Lars Redeligx. “We have a tremendous opportunity to make airports even more memorable places to enjoy.”

The hope is that passengers will remember airports as places where they had pleasurable moments, rather than somewhere that involves hours of queueing. But that could be some time off. SITA’s Lavorel admitted that queueing is still “the number one challenge” at airports, noting that “the two pain points remain border control and losing baggage.”

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Featured image credited to istock.com/anouchka