The International Civil Aviation Organisation (ICAO) sees the scanning of passenger boarding passes and check-in at airports globally giving way in the next three years. This is being interpreted as the biggest shake-up to air travel in 50 years.
In their places ICAO says air travellers will be able to scan their faces on arrival at airports and upload their passports to their phones.
This will do away with the traditional process of passengers presenting their boarding passes to security and producing their passports at the check-in counter.
Rather than carrying physical documentation as proof of identity passengers will now have a ‘digital travel credential’ which will be stored on their mobile phones.
Within this digital bundle will be all the documentation needed to board a plane including passports and flight details.
As part of their travel package, customers will download a ‘journey pass’ onto their phones which will automatically update them if their flight is delayed or cancelled.
Depending on the amount of luggage brought to the airport, passengers will either go through security at the bag drop off point or at security gates.
Airlines will be told of a passenger’s intention to fly after their face is scanned by security after arrival at the airport.
Airports and airlines are keen to avoid chaotics scenes like this
Currently, before taking off passengers are expected to either download their boarding pass or print it off at the airport, which is then scanned at the boarding gate.
But in the new system this will not be necessary and it is expected it will radically shorten the process of going through security at airports when they are brought in.
However, airports will need to install facial recognition technology in order to scan passport photographs and people’s faces.
The ICAO has said airports will not store any information scanned by computers in the check in process.
Any data recorded will be deleted from the computer system after 15 seconds to prevent any breaches of personal information.
There are only a few countries where facial recognition technology is used in this way, including America for passengers returning home from abroad.
The UK Home Office last year said it was looking at using e-gates on borders using facial recognition technology to remove the need to produce a passport.
Valerie Viale from Amadeus, the largest travel technology company in the world, speaking on this said: “These changes are the biggest in 50 years. Many airline systems haven’t changed for more than 50 years because everything has to be consistent across the industry and interoperable.”
Facial recognition technology could replace tradition checking in at airports
“At the moment airlines have systems that are very siloed.
“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 addition to the streamlined approach to security checks, some airlines are considering including a ‘location’ service in the digital journey bundle.
British Airways, Air France-KLM, Finnair and Saudia Airlines are all understood to be evaluating the service, which would provide customers with directions to the departure gates.
There will also be the option to automatically update hire car companies of any delays on flights to avoid any confusion or excess charges.
However, airports have previously been caught out by relying on technology too much.
In July last year, planes were grounded when Microsoft crashed owing to a faulty update which caused chaos across the world.
Departure boards in airports including Heathrow, Gatwick and Edinburgh completely froze and passengers were left stranded for hours.
