Digital Travel – a win-win-win for all stakeholders

A win for airlines

Airlines spend a huge amount of time and effort in making sure they know who they’re carrying and whether they are allowed to travel to their chosen destination. Airlines must meet the obligations of complying with complex and ever-changing regulations. It’s essential that they do this, of course, for safety and security reasons, but manual checks are laborious, expensive, and not always accurate. They also increase passenger anxiety, and lead to increased passenger dissatisfaction waiting in long queues. And the penalty for getting it wrong is inconvenience for passengers and expense for airlines, with governments imposing hefty fines on airlines carrying inadmissible passengers. At worst, getting it wrong poses genuine threats to security and safety.

Airlines are embracing a “Digital First” strategy by promoting self-service check-in 24 hours in advance at home like never before. SITA’s Digital Travel is a natural extension of this, allowing manual processes, such as document checks, to now also be completed at home. Digital Travel, enabled by biometrics, means airline staff manual duties can better serve their passengers through automation. It decreases the pressure on frontline staff and can even help take some of the processing away from the airport itself – via online biometric enrolment, for example.

In addition, airlines are looking to improve their retailing experience through Know Your Customer (KYC) initiatives. KYC allows airlines to have confidence in the identity of their passengers, thereby strengthening relationships and enhancing the customer experience. With Digital Travel, this extends to other revenue areas, such as partnerships with car hire companies and hotels. By leveraging KYC, airlines can offer personalized services and promotions, creating a seamless and integrated travel experience for their passengers.

It also allows airlines to differentiate themselves by delivering a much better passenger experience and to create synergies with other customer services, including lounge access, loyalty programs, and more. With trusted digital identities, you can explore new business models on and off the airport and derive new revenue streams.

A win for airports

Airports are some of the most complex operating environments on earth, balancing the needs and constraints of dozens of different processes in real time every day. External factors such as weather, scheduling, and unscheduled maintenance can significantly impact an airline for hours or days.

As passenger numbers increase, digital travel can dramatically help reduce the pressure from terminal congestion – both by increasing throughput and by taking some of the processing off-airport. Queue-bound processes such as check-in, bag drop, and boarding can be made faster, smoother, and hassle-free when the passenger journey is biometrically enabled.

Digital travel frees up your gate agents from administrative duties, such as manual document checks. So they can focus more on customer satisfaction duties – such as boarding elderly passengers, young families, and travelers with disabilities.

A win for governments

Governments want to know who’s coming to their country as far in advance as possible, and ideally, before they even set off on their journey. You want to push your borders out to the point of departure, or even prior to check-in, from the comfort of the passenger’s home.

Digital travel means you can facilitate governments to make preliminary security and immigration checks well ahead of travel, including issuing electronic travel authorizations or eVisas if required. You can pre-clear passengers for travel before they even get on the plane, with traveler identities checked in advance by using government-grade digital identity credentials such as the Type-1 ICAO DTC. This improves security and lets immigration officers at arrival focus on higher-value duties such as roaming or intelligence. So you deliver a better passenger experience for visitors to your country.

Passengers overwhelmingly favor convenience and a hassle-free journey – especially on arrival in a foreign country. Indeed, 87% said they would share their immigration information if it sped up the airport arrival process – up from 83% a year earlier. Fully 91% of passengers are interested in special programs to expedite security screening for trusted travelers via background checks¹. These travelers they will actively avoid countries known for long and tedious immigration processes, choosing destinations instead that make it easy for them.

A win for travelers

In the digital era, the vast majority of people use technology every day, and they’re now highly accustomed to interacting with their devices using biometrics.

Digital travel is simply an extension of this process, as passengers move seamlessly through the airport and onto the aircraft. With digital travel, it is possible to securely store travel credentials on their mobile devices. Passengers own and control their digital identities and consent to how they will be used and with whom. With biometrics, instead of physical travel documents, they also benefit from far better protection of their private data.

Through interaction with airline or airport apps, passengers can also benefit from loyalty programs, special offers, and improved service across their journey end-to-end.

[1] https://www.iata.org/en/pressroom/2023-releases/2023-10-25-01/