Air travel is becoming increasingly complicated. From security and passport checks to special documentation such as COVID-19 certificates, passengers have to prepare carefully before leaving for their holidays. The number of planes and passenger numbers is also increasing, and airports are under pressure to reduce waiting times. Upcoming travel authorization regimes such as the European Union Entry and Exit System (EES) are expected to further complicate holiday and business trips.
A solution that can reduce some of this complexity is Digital Travel Credentials (DTCs).
Europe and Canada have just completed trials of the world's first transatlantic digital travel authorization using the DTC-1 model, allowing Belgian, Dutch and Canadian passport holders to skip the queues by using an app that enables biometric authentication with a selfie.
“The big challenge is that the whole infrastructure is not yet in place and it's still in its infancy,” said Nick van Straten, biometrics and customs program director at KLM Royal Dutch Airlines, “but we all know that facial recognition is the easy part and the algorithms and the technology are really state of the art.”
Van Straten shared the results of the DTC pilot during a webinar hosted by Border Security Report.
The trial was conducted by a Dutch consortium co-funded by the European Commission, a public-private partnership that includes several parties, including the Dutch Ministry of Justice, KLM, Transport Canada, and Idemia, which provided the biometric technology.
From a border control perspective, DTC is effective, says Lisette Lauren de Jong, border control innovation program manager at the Dutch Ministry of Justice and Security. Digital documents have reduced border crossing times to about 10 to 14 seconds, with the fastest crossings taking just about six seconds. Trials have been conducted at Montreal-Trudeau International Airport and Amsterdam Schiphol Airport, where airport authorities have installed new tap-and-go eGates.
“The result is a significant reduction in time at the border,” she says. “This is a real milestone and a very important start to a new and innovative border control process in the Netherlands.”
But it's not yet clear whether travelers will embrace the new digital credentials: More than 10,000 passengers were invited to take part in the pilot, and more than 1,000 participated, but only half ultimately went through the process.
Speakers said this was because the pilot lasted only three months, but some passengers found it difficult to participate because of the high standards for security and data privacy.
“Looking forward, we need to balance IT security and data privacy, but at the same time make it easy for customers to sign up,” says van Straten.
One positive outcome was that 85% of passengers who registered to board the flight were able to board safely.
During the trial, travellers were asked to download the Dutch government-created DTC app from the Android store and verify their identity from home. Passengers' age and nationality were verified through their Machine Readable Passport (MRZ) and the chip in their Electronic Machine Readable Travel Document (eMRTD) was also checked.
In a next step, passengers are asked to take a selfie video for biometric comparison. The DTC is then stored locally on the phone, where it remains for the next 72 hours. The pilot project aims to minimize data, so the timeframe is limited, explains Peter Guezen, project manager at Idemia Smart Identity. In the future, the DTC may be reused.
Passengers must register for a specific flight or border control. They can then pass through a KLM eGate, where their face is checked and matched with information from the DTC. Finally, passengers are asked to tap their passport on the eGate terminal and the gate opens.
Going forward, DTC experiments will need to address many more issues, such as storing and processing data in compliance with EU AI law and GDPR. Digitalizing passport verification will need to be considered holistically, from the law to the role of airlines and even what information should be held on a passport.
“When you talk about interoperability and how this works across the process for each gate, there's really a lot of work to be done before we can scale this up,” Van Straten adds.
EIC session explores the future of travel with digital travel credentials
Article Topics
Biometrics | Border Control | Canada | Digital ID | Digital Travel Credentials | IDEMIA | Netherlands | Pilot Project | Public-Private Partnership
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