So-called “seamless travel” facilitated by biometrics is on everyone’s lips at Passenger Terminal Expo in Madrid. The idea that one’s face can be pre-linked to a central travel document, and used as a passport, boarding pass and even a hotel check-in document is an enthralling one to many. To others, it’s a dystopian nightmare. But what’s the reality according to the people in the know?
Amadeus is one of the largest players at the annual conference, and its literal centre stage booth was a showcase of its suite of biometric tech, from check-in to bag-drop all the way through security and boarding.
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According to Jeff Lennon, the company’s VP of strategic sales, the tech is ready to go (even if he had some difficulties showing the facial recognition hardware when giving Airport Technology a tour).
“Technically, it’s completely available. There needs to be a handshake between governments as a provider, as a partner, we give them the tools,” he says.
He’s not alone in that viewpoint. Another provider of age and identity verification, John Vallis, senior business development manager at Innovative Technology, tells Airport Technology effective tokenised biometric facial recognition tech “is already here”.
“You could do it today. In fact, you could do it yesterday, even better. That’s essentially part of the journey, and that’s what we’re here to promote,” he explains.
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By GlobalDataOthers think the reality of truly seamless travel is possible, and even likely, but suggest there are more hurdles than the likes of Amadeus might admit to.
Loren Mathias at INFORM uses the example of bag tagging. While he says the idea of seamless bagdrops is sound, and the tech has brought us very close, challenges like interoperability of baggage management are yet to find a true solution.
“I think bag tags are going to be with us for quite a long time. Even if one company gets rid of the need for a bag tag using things like baggage ID, like computer vision technology or something else, the minute that bag gets transferred to some other partner carrier, it needs a bag tag, right? Or you have to have that technology at all acceptance points, or it won’t work,” he tells Airport Technology over a coffee.
“Check-in is likely to disappear”
The discussion on the future of passenger travel was accelerated by Amadeus’s publication of a new white paper, “From DCS to Delivery”, at Passenger Terminal Expo.
While the near 30-page paper discusses a multitude of changes to the airport experience the Spanish company hopes to achieve with a change from DCS technology to Delivery Management Systems, perhaps the most pertinent for the passenger experience is the death of airport check-in.
“Traditional check-in and travel document checks, e.g. visa checks at the terminal will no longer be needed, meaning travellers can drop their bag, using the baggage acceptance capabilities of delivery, and move smoothly to security. Even bag-drop can be avoided if the passenger chooses a door-to-door bag pick-up and delivery service from the airline,” the paper claims.
While online check-in is widely available for many flights, and for short flights (and holidays or business trips) without checked baggage is widely used, there remain significant barriers to the “retirement” of physical check-in at airports.
Amadeus say its technology puts the “choice” in the hands of airlines and their passengers.
“In many parts of the world, airlines will be able to retire traditional check-in if they choose. This can be achieved using a mix of continual engagement to understand the traveller’s intention to fly and new abilities to track the passenger’s location.”
This wording is purposeful.
“In many parts of the world…” does not claim that seamless travel will happen everywhere. It seems to understand that regulations vary globally, as do the politics of liberalising passenger transport access.
And that’s important, because as others point out, it is not realistic to imagine seamless global travel in the next decade or even further ahead.
“The challenge with this is nothing to do with technology and everything to do with policy. And it’s policy at a local level, then it’s about aligned policy at an international level,” explains Martin Bowman, chief of strategy at Smarter Airports.
The issue according to Bowman is the pace of geopolitics.
“If you are telling me that the world is going to align its policy at an international level to make seamless travel happen everywhere in 15 years, I say no.
“No chance. It will not happen. You might see point-to-point innovations. You might see reciprocal arrangements. You will not see global seamless travel.”
And as the Scot points out, his understanding is not plucked out of midair. There are other parts of the airport ingress system that have faced the exact problem he predicts with wider ‘seamless travel’.
“The simple analogy would be what’s happening just now with the security scanners, right? We’ve got the security scanner mandate in some countries. So passengers are leaving today and enjoying the fact that they don’t need to take liquids out in the bag, enjoying the faster process time. But then they get to their inbound flight, and that mandate is not in place, and they have to do the old process again.
“It’s exactly the same concept, unless there’s an alignment at a policy level, you will not see this happen at an international level.”
Security is certainly not forgotten in Amadeus’s view of the future, and the example of scanner laws in different jurisdictions is a good one, albeit one the tech provider does not see as its problem.
“As a technology supplier, all the tools are available. Obviously we have to anticipate all kinds of scenarios. But then it’s an airport or a government responsibility to prepare the operational procedure for when, for whatever reason, the country has an electrical outage, a network outage, they will immediately see that the system is not operating for a certain reason,” Lennon opines.
“So they have to have a backup plan, a fallback scenario where people are taking over… a manual backup operation. They [airports] need to have a scenario that accommodates such a situation [as a power outage or terror attack].”
Biometric hurdles
While Amadeus says biometrics use can improve the passenger security experience, it comes with two problems: one technical and one human.
One key tenet of modern security is the identification of bag to passenger, and as Mathias says, the bag tag has been a simple and useful tool which airlines are unlikely to give up without considerable persuasion.
Experts at the intersection of baggage and security voice concerns about the use of data and the usefulness of seamless engagement.
Ken Mann, a senior manager at Rapiscan, expands on the potential political challenges that security firms would face if reliant on biometrics.
“In many countries, certainly most European countries, and a lot around the world, we cannot differentiate based on a passenger’s identity. Maybe on the flight destination, but generally not on the passenger’s identity.
“For us, we don’t really want to.”
“So whereas you might be able to at the sort of boarding card level and the passport level, just use someone’s biometric identifier for us, we probably wouldn’t want to,” he puts it plainly.
Without regulation changes to allow for security systems to identify passengers and bag owners using personal data, it seems the use of traditional security techniques cannot truly become seamless.
But on the human side, even if regulatory challenges are overcome and governments sign an international charter recognising biometric security protocols, the aviation industry risks alienating significant volumes of passengers who do not trust the tech.
The Amadeus view, Lennon expresses, is that trust and “an emotional connection” can and will be built by the successful operation of the technology.
“For me, the best feedback is when a passenger goes to the border officer when he crosses the border and he says, ‘wow, that was amazing. Can I do it a second time?’ That’s the best possible return you can have, versus the stressful moment it’s supposed to be at the border,” he tells Airport Technology.
How does this work if passengers don’t trust biometric data collection, aren’t constantly connected, or are travelling to a destination that doesn’t have systems set up, either practically or legally?
The jury’s out, and it’s looking like a long wait.
