Seamless Travel Is the New Normal

Contactless clearance and touchless biometrics have been assigned 1st Class seats in the post-COVID-19 travel environment. Travellers who have experienced seamless travel-based technology can readily attest that facial recognition throughout the clearance journey makes the process easier and faster. Amidst an unprecedented global pandemic, airports, airlines and government agencies are looking at seamless technology to support health guidelines and measures to keep travellers safe and prevent pathogens from spreading through global travel.

With passenger volumes certain to return to record-breaking levels once travel returns to normal, transforming the traveller journey using digital identity will be essential to create and maintain a consistent, end-to-end experience that improves security, efficiency, capability and capacity throughout the system.

Already, leading airports are working on their digital transformation strategies by focusing on achieving a comfortable, unfettered ecosystem with no obstacles and without the need for physical travel documents. This transformation into a digital airport model makes face recognition the standard identification token of the modern passenger experience.

On the Move and Contactless

The manual clearance process where travellers line up to prove who they are by showing travel documents is coming to an end.

It’s being replaced by a digital identity system that begins at check-in and automatically verifies the traveller’s identity and

clearance eligibility across their journey. Seamless travel is made possible by establishing automated face biometry as a unique identifier for all stages of the clearance process. By gathering and verifying traveller data only once, as early as possible, human-centric touchpoints provide quick, on-the-move transactions, authenticating facial features as individuals progress through their journey. This is all done without the need to present documents to officials or stop at any clearance point.

The introduction of a digital framework allows for the evolution of interaction models that promote personalised, responsive communication between travellers and their environment. Seamless Airports are open, evolving and inviting ecosystems that reward the people using them.

Orchestrating a Seamless Traveler Journey

An overarching digital orchestration platform enables the complete traveller lifestyle transformation spanning the entire journey.

It is a feasible and cost-effective way to advance operational capability and capacity within a green program by optimizing existing physical space and capitalizing on legacy infrastructure. Orchestration is the crucial bridge that connects the conventional airport system silos already in place.

As the brain of traveller operations, an Orchestration platform manages workflows, business processes and informational streams, while converging all shared services. It integrates automation with manual assets for an optimized traveller flow. These elements include common-use self-service kiosks, baggage-drop stations, on-the-move biometric gates and totems into a fully connected network.

Real-time data orchestration gives stakeholders immediate situational awareness and insightful measurements related to the efficiency of operations and security levels. Data sharing, however, does not happen at the expense of data privacy. A platform’s embedded information management framework should prioritize the privacy of personal data and allows for its use in a value-generation way by giving the information owner complete control over whether to share data.

This balance between the use and the protection of data is established by design. A privacy-protected digital identity framework is enabled by an opt-in/out choice, according to permissions defined by the individual It is then channelled across stakeholders according to privacy rules, to allow for real-time clearance at different instances of the journey, unlocking personalized services.

Aruba International: An innovation launchpad connected to the world

Aruba changed the aviation industry when it launched Happy Flow™ in 2015. It was the first 100% biometric on-the-ground journey anywhere. In addition to featuring the first-ever OneID biometric journey, Aruba is spanning a major expansion investment under the Gateway 2030 program which will be the theatre of new joint innovation sprints. It will deliver the next-gen US CBP Pre-clearance framework, fully utilizing on-the-move contactless technology and supported by a cross-border enabled collaborative system, allowing for a 100% frictionless experience for U.S. returning travellers.

Kempegowda International Airport, Bangalore: paperless travel in a Digital India

Having handled over 25 million passengers in 2017, Bangalore Airport is one of the focal aviation hubs in Asia and shows the second-largest passenger number growth rate in the world. To handle the capacity growth, the airport deployed the first end-to-end face recognition-based clearance experience in Asia which will be the largest in the world. It provides a paperless biometric journey from registration to boarding.