Dealing with the widely disparate requirements to prove passengers have tested negative for COVID-19 before travel has proven to be an immense challenge — and it’s one that airlines have, to date, largely had to do manually. It’s been the greatest de-digitalisation in airline history, as self-service from check-in to bag drop to gate has rolled back to physical document checking by airline staff.
So what’s the way forward? We sat down with Christoph Leffers, head of the Lufthansa Group’s task force on testing and vaccination, to find out what the group has learned from being at the forefront of at-airport testing centres, as part of a package of measures to deal with the COVID-19 crisis.
Lufthansa sees three distinct phases to its work so far
Starting a year ago, the airline group implemented testing centres at its major hubs and focus cities, including Frankfurt, Munich, Vienna and Hamburg.
Among the first partnerships was between Lufthansa and Centogene at Frankfurt Airport, explains Leffers, noting that “we wanted to make sure for our passengers that they had easy access to test capacities when they needed it for travelling, because that was a time in Germany when there was not that large scale testing available.”
After this first phase, and over the summer period, and as testing became more widely available, the group started to provide further information to passengers originating from smaller airports on where they could secure testing that would meet the needs of their destination.
More widely, the focus was pivoting from ensuring testing availability to using testing — and providing handling of test documentation — to reduce quarantine requirements and open closed borders.
Some promising work in this second phase, and indeed some acceptance from the likes of the ECDC and EASA, was scuppered by the emergence of several more worrying mutant variants of the SARS-CoV-2 virus at the end of 2020 into early 2021.
The third phase is firmly fixed on the recovery
“In the third phase, where we are actually now,” Leffers says, “it’s not only about testing anymore, it’s also about vaccination and immunisation document handling,” the latter being in the case where a person is showing antibodies following recovery from the disease.
“We are in the stage where we are now actively preparing for a rollout and restart of the industry,” Leffers explains, “given that there will be testing requirements, there will be vaccination documentation requirements, and also immunisation documentation requirements. We have to prepare our group and our partners in our processes for reopening of the market in these circumstances.”
Indeed, even the set of requirements around testing in previous stages has proven a challenge industry-wide, with regulations changing based on origin, destination, operator, and other factors, often at speed.
“Before the crisis, we had a large number of passengers who basically did all their check in and boarding touchless with their smartphone, and in the process, we never actually touched the passenger personally, or had a personal touch point, unless the passenger had some special needs or wanted it.”
But the changing nature of the COVID-19 crisis, and governments’ response to it, meant that this digitalisation had to be rolled back. As individual governments decided they wanted testing, perhaps of specific test types like PCR or antigen, perhaps with exacting sensitivity and specificity requirements, perhaps within one of a range of time windows, systems struggled to keep up. Processes rolled back decades, with manual checks by airport staff now de rigueur as requirements changed daily.
Lufthansa is working in partnership with specialists to deliver the third phase
One of the key learning points during these previous phases of the programme, Leffers says, “is that the testing itself is something that we don’t want to do as an airline. It’s something that we need partners for. So we are working together with laboratory partners and medical companies around the world to do that testing for us.”
“We don’t want to do it ourselves for various reasons,” he says, including that it’s not exactly core business for an airline, “but one very important reason is data protection — and it’s medical data that you have, and it’s something that you don’t really want to get too involved with as an airline if you don’t have to.”
In essence, an airline only wants to see medical data for one brief moment: to determine whether it meets entry requirements for the passenger’s destination (and potentially transit) country and tick them off the list as ‘ready to board’.
The worst case is that a staffer has to do it at the airport: this is expensive, time-consuming and there’s precious little time for the passenger to rectify any errors around timing or type of test, for example.
That’s why Lufthansa is trialling “giving our customers the option to upload their health certificate,” Leffers says, “through a secure digital channel, so that we do the checking and the setting of the tick mark as ‘ready to board’, remotely, centralised, maybe IT-supported.”
Once the tick mark is set, the data can then be deleted on a methodical basis according to whichever set of national regulations, whether that’s the EU GDPR, US HIPAA, or other standards.
(There is something of a complication in the event of late-changing destination/transit requirements, but this can likely be dealt with by a combination of notifications to repeat the process for verification against the new requirements, and an at-airport staff surge hit-squad to mop up anyone else manually.)
In terms of systems to manage the question of setting that tick mark, “we do not see which technology will be the winning technology or if there is a winning technology,” Leffers says, explaining that “we work together with basically all the major players in the field.”
Leffers cites CommonPass, IATA’s Travel Pass initiative and AOKpass among the current technologies being considered, and notes a lack of intent even within the European Union for a common pass, with interoperability more of a focus. “We have to be open to work with all those documents, which is part of the challenge — which is a big challenge.”
Working with Amadeus, Lufthansa’s checkin and departure control system provider, as well as other industry partners, the airline group is firmly fixed on the redigitalisation of airline operations.
“Our primary focus,” Leffers says, “is how we reinstate those automated processes and how to enable us and our guests to get back to an automated process, making it convenient for them and for us.”
It seems clear that the industry will need to move faster to integrate this automated and remote processing into its digital systems in order to support the restart — both as part of the vaccination rollout period and when the fight against COVID-19 moves from pandemic to endemic.
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