To reopen borders without quarantine and restart aviation governments need to be confident that they are effectively mitigating the risk of importing COVID-19. This means having accurate information on passengers’ COVID-19 health status.
Informing passengers on what tests, vaccines and other measures they require prior to travel, details on where they can get tested and giving them the ability to share their tests and vaccination results in a verifiable, safe and privacy-protecting manner is the key to giving governments the confidence to open borders. To address this challenge the International Air Transport Association (IATA) has worked out the IATA Travel Pass, a digital platform for passengers.
The IATA Travel Pass effectively acts as a ‘digital passport’ for travelers and is the latest tool in the fight against the spread of COVID-19, enabling passengers to securely and effortlessly navigate their travel plans, safe in the knowledge that their verified travel credential is based on the latest COVID-19 information, the strictest data privacy regulations and entry rules for the destination they will travel to.
IATA Travel Pass will also provide up-to-date information on COVID-19 health regulations helping travelers to ensure they meet the latest government entry requirements of their destination country.
IATA is expected to launch a digital platform for passengers in late March.
Speaking at a briefing on February 24, Alexandre de Juniac, IATA Director General and CEO, said that with respect to health credentials these past weeks have seen more airlines sign-up to trial the IATA Travel Pass. “That will help us be ready for the restart. Manual processes will not be able to cope with the volume of travelers when the recovery begins. But we cannot just have any digital solution,” IATA CEO noted.
The system reportedly must be secure, work with existing systems, align with global standards, and respect data privacy.
These fundamentals are at the core of the IATA Travel Pass. It is reportedly setting a very high bar for managing health credentials, protecting against fraud and enabling a convenient travel process.
