Aviation digitalisation’s experience before, during and after the disruption of the COVID-19 pandemic travel restrictions changed like never before. We sat down with senior executives at Emirates and SITA AT BORDERS for more details on what the industry learned, how its digitalisation roadmap has changed, and what the future holds.
Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, airlines and airports were digitalising at pace. Self-service had moved a substantial part of airport and traveller operations to passengers’ portable electronic devices, apps and kiosks, and in many cases the first time a traveller interacted with an airline staffer was at the door of the aircraft. COVID travel restrictions changed all that, and the industry had to rapidly dedigitalise, turning processes manual and requiring maximum resources even for minimal flight operations.
“It meant,” Jeremy Springall, vice president at SITA for Borders tells us, “that nations needed information on those intending to travel to their borders that had never been requested before: health information, medical test results and history, travel records, etc.”
Initially, the work to gather this needed to be done manually before and during checkin: line-by-line agent checks of declarations, vaccinations, tests and identity, practically dedigitalising the entire process.
Massive inefficiencies — one airline quoted 100 percent of its checkin staff being used to process 5 percent of its flights at one point — drove the first steps towards redigitalisation, an early surge in apps and technology solutions towards digital wallets.
“These apps, however, rarely considered existing airport, airline, and especially border processes, procedures, and capabilities,” Springall says. “For border control, for example, the lack of integration between the health status of travellers and existing border automation systems meant that passengers were often subject to manual processing. We started to see technology providers like SITA, carriers, port authorities, and integrators come together to develop collaborative solutions, initially on how to get test results to airlines, mainly utilising health pass apps, to demonstrate to border control authorities that health status information could be safely and securely processed electronically, and in advance of travel.”
Lessons learned during pandemic restrictions have accelerated the rebound digitalisation roadmap
In much of the world, standards emerged, like the EU’s Digital COVID Certificate, and in some cases systems created for aviation use were repurposed for wider societal benefit. In one 2021 example, SITA piloted a health app in partnership with the Aruba government and Indicio, using the travel app’s trusted credentials for access to hospitality venues on the island.
Emirates, meanwhile, has leveraged integrated biometric path systems implemented during the pandemic to improve the passenger experience at Dubai International Airport.
Keenan Hamza, vice president, for technology futures and innovation at Emirates Group, tells us that “this gives passengers a contactless airport experience and a seamless travel journey from specific check-in to boarding gates, improving customer flow through the airport with less document checks and less queuing. Using the latest biometric technology — a mix of facial and iris recognition — the various touchpoints in the biometric path allow for a hygienic contactless travel journey, reducing human interaction and putting emphasis on health and safety.”
Fundamentally, “COVID-19 has had a profound impact on how the travel industry operates, forcing it to refocus on the passenger journey as a near-walkthrough digital experience. It has accelerated a seamless and contactless process through the airport, through immigration and customs,” says SITA’s Springall.
Aviation’s reset roadmap includes new and refocused digitalisation pathways
“Digital travel and collaboration are essential for the travel industry to tackle the challenges it faces,” Springall says, including “future pandemics or the phenomenal growth in traveler numbers, reliance on physical documents, staff shortages, rising expectations for joined-up intermodal journeys, government austerity, and more.”
Indeed, self-service technologies remain high on airlines’ IT investment priority list, particularly around disruption and irregular operations in the context of staff shortages and the ground handling people crunch. Biometrics are key here, but growing privacy concerns and increasingly stringent regulation are hurdles that need to be cleared.
Airlines and airports are also focussed on automated and integrated communication, including baggage tracking, even as new consumer products like Apple’s AirTags change the technology landscape in which the industry operates.
The set of Industry 4.0 technologies, business intelligence, and integration across silos and systems, including via APIs, will become of increasing importance as airlines procure systems and calculate their benefits.
But the present context is a complicated one, SITA’s Springall notes: “A swifter-than-expected recovery of demand has confronted aviation CIOs with increased disruptions, baggage mountains, and staff shortages. While traffic volumes in 2022 rose to about 90 percent of 2019 levels, passenger traffic has been characterised by much higher volatility, with spikes during key holiday periods such as Easter and summer.”
The industry needs to increase its speed to market with new technology segments
Digital identity is a major technology segment that will change the way the entire airline sector manages passengers — plus the identity and security management of its own staff. Early initiatives developed at speed during the pandemic like the IATA Travel Pass and the Digital Travel Credential (DTC) from UN body ICAO, the International Civil Aviation Organisation.
“Digital identities mean we will be able to travel from anywhere to everywhere — by air, land, or sea — without needing to show our physical travel documents. As the technology underpinning these digital identities mature, the benefits are enormous,” Springall says. “For one, it gives the traveling public more control over what information they share and with whom. This is privacy by design — addressing a key concern for the travelling public. Also, this move supports an era of digital borders where the immigration checkpoint is pushed to the point of departure. Passengers can provide all the documentation for a trip — visa, passport, and flight details — well in advance and arrive at the airport, rail station, or port ready to travel. That means a quick scan of your face or mobile phone is all that will be needed.”
Crucially, this work will require substantial consultation and liaison with national governments and wider digital citizen identity initiatives, not least because acceptance of ID cards, confidence in authorities, and understanding of privacy concerns all differ widely between and even within countries.
In addition to digital identity, integrating low- and zero-emissions travel — whether rail, e-VTOL, air taxis or automated ground transportation — will be vital. Many airlines, including Emirates, are focussing on the technology pipeline with business accelerators, entrepreneurship platforms, and startup hub partnerships that bring early engagement (and thus substantial benefit) to both the tech and aviation industries.
Beyond the existing digitalisation pathways, Springall concludes, “we see several of the emerging technologies from a few years ago being more widely adopted today to address trends and issues like sustainability, growing travel demands, the rise of automation and self-service, rising expectations for joined-up intermodal journeys, and more.”
Author: John Walton
Published 15 June 2023
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