Mobile check-in has become one
of the unexpected victims of Covid because of the need to check health
documentation manually but a new tie-up between Amadeus and Lufthansa looks set to allow
travellers to have a quicker and smoother journey as business trips resume.
The two companies have announced
the implementation of Traveler ID for Safe Travel which allows passengers to verify their
health documentation directly through the airline’s app, including the European Union’s digital Covid certificate (DCC).
The system allows the airline to
issue a boarding pass automatically without further physical checks, saving time
at the airport. Passengers can now use the system on all of Lufthansa’s weekly 2,000 flights from non-risk Schengen areas.
Amadeus' EVP for global ecosystem initiatives Monika Wiederhold told
BTN Europe, “We could see early on in the pandemic all the regulations and complexities
in these new processes. It has broken automation and creates queues
and waiting time. Traveler ID for Safe Travel is really targeted at bringing back the efficiency in
the process and saving travellers hours of time in check-in queues.”
The system checks the requirements for a particular trip with country regulations before
asking passengers to provide the necessary health documentation.
“The EU DCC is
currently one of the global standards and that was key for us,” said
Wiederhold. “Other countries outside the EU are starting to follow this
standard. Yet there is no single global standard, meaning it is important to integrate
with other health aggregators; we have integrated with IBM Health Pass and we
are closely working with IATA Travel Pass and others.”
“We started this initiative in
a very open and collaborative way, to connect as many solutions as possible.
That is an important element of the solution,” she said.
The system is also fully
integrated with Centogene, Lufthansa’s partner for medical testing services in
Germany. This means that travellers who book their PCR or antigen test through the
company are also able to scan a QR code as they check-in through the airline
app, and the documentation will be automatically processed through Amadeus’ connection with Centogene.
Wiederhold
said that the Traveler ID for Safe Travel system is now live with ten airlines,
including Lufthansa, Air Canada and Norwegian Air Shuttle, and the company is expected
to pass the milestone of a million validations today. Other airlines are in the
pipeline for the end of the year.