Digital Travel: definition and benefits
As the travel industry accelerates its digital transformation, SITA plays a crucial role. We collaborate with airlines, airports, governments, industry bodies, and others to deliver Digital Travel experiences for today and tomorrow. This paper explains Digital Travel and its benefits and sketches how industry players and SITA can join forces to turn theory into practice.
Travel industry’s challenges
Digital Travel will deliver significant efficiency benefits for passengers, airlines, airports, and governments. It is essential to tackle the trends and challenges facing the travel industry. Traveler numbers are growing again. However, airports and governments continue to rely on physical documents, and airlines must commit many resources to identity and travel eligibility verification. The industry suffers from staff shortages. At the same time, check-in booths, kiosks, and gates are difficult to scale, increasing the need to move processes off-airport. Travelers must enroll in different airline programs and download multiple apps but cannot make much use of existing identities. They expect mobile, biometric, and touchless technologies to make their journeys easier (SITA Passenger IT Insights 2022). Governments, in the meantime, want to achieve more with fewer resources because of national austerity, and they will implement more stringent future identity checks for security and safety.
Digital travel is a future where you can travel by air, sea, or land from anywhere to everywhere without needing to present your travel documents (such as your passport, visa, health forms, or boarding pass) and without having to stop to confirm your identity, check in, cross a border or access services at your destination.
What it means for passengers
• Safe, secure, and stress-free travel
• Passengers can complete processes securely off-airport
• With their digital identity verified, passengers can go through all the usual airport and border processes using just their face, which replaces their passport and boarding pass.
• Seamless entry on arrival and the ability to use the same digital identity at your destination for checking into hotels or other venues.
Article by SITA
This paper explains Digital Travel and its benefits and sketches how industry players and SITA can join forces to turn theory into practice.
