IATA Travel Pass: you won't travel without it!

It’s not yet clear whether COVID vaccinations will be required for travel, but things are being put in place to monitor travelers’ vaccinations, regardless of whether this becomes mandatory or not.

Vaccination, a prerequisite for recovery

One thing is certain: the vaccine is the sine qua non for a return to normalcy. Back to normal in general, but especially back to normal for the travel industry, which faces a double challenge:

Restore travelers’ trust so that they can travel again, both in the means of transport and in the sanitary conditions at their destination.
Restore destinations’ trust in travelers, so that they suspend barriers to entry and restart the sectors (hotels, restaurants, convention centers, museums, etc.) that drive travel.

Compulsory or not, it’s in everyone’s interest to vaccinate the entire population, but the subject is so critical that playing with fire is out of the question.

The need for a trusted system

Given the critical nature of the subject, no one will be satisfied with half measures and self-certifications. What governments and industry players need is a universal system that is not subject to any questionning.

The worst thing that could happen was for everyone to create their own vaccination control system. This would only raise questions:

Systems of complacency with economic or governmental players who might be less careful than others in pushing for the reopening of borders and activities.
The risk of falsification of vaccination certificates by travelers.
Trafficking in false certificates.
Recognition of vaccination certificates abroad: what is the value of a certificate issued by a French doctor during an entry control in China, and vice versa? Authenticity, reliability, certification of the vaccine used, not to mention the language problems that were not without problems for the PCR tests.
Confidentiality of sensitive health data in the hands of private or public economic players who could divert it from its intended purpose.
Recognition of control systems from one country to another.

To put it plainly, there were two examples to avoid: on the one hand, the confiscation of vaccination certification by private players (airlines) in disparate schemes, and on the other, the multiplication of more or less shaky national schemes like the sad French TousAntiCovid.

IATA takes charge

There is therefore a multi-party responsibility here between the laboratories that carry out the tests, the governments that verify their veracity, and the airlines that must validate their authenticity as well as the identity of the person traveling.

Added to this is the need to preserve data confidentiality, while enabling control by those in charge of the data, which is reminiscent of the introduction of the biometric passport.

To compensate for the inevitable wait-and-see attitude of governments faced with the difficulty of devising a collective solution, IATA (International Air Transport Association) launched the development of a digital passport this autumn, so that states would only have to formalize its existence. This is the IATA Travel Pass.

What is the IATA Travel Pass?

The IATA Travel Pass is a solution made up of 4 modules covering the traveler’s journey from end to end.

– The collection of prerequisites for entering a country, to inform passengers and provide acceptance criteria for airlines, based on Timatic, which is already the authoritative basis today.

– List of laboratories authorized to test or vaccinate passengers.

– The Lab App for certified laboratories to check-in a passenger’s vaccination certificate.

– The contactless travel application that enables passengers to travel by providing the authorities with all the information they need.

A first with Singapore Airlines

The first airline to experiment with the Travel Pass will be Singapore Airlines, departing from Kuala Lumpur or Jakarta to Singapore, before extending it to the rest of the network.

There’s no doubt that further announcements of this kind will come quickly, and that Travel Pass will be in widespread use over the next 6 months.

But for Travel Pass to be a success, there are still a number of issues to be resolved.

Practical questions still unanswered

We’re delighted that the application is based on open source components and can be deployed quickly on a decentralized basis, unlike a proprietary solution which would have been too cumbersome.

Skeptics will regret that it was IATA, a trade association, which took the initiative, and not a “non-mercantile” structure such as ICAO (International Civil Aviation Organization), which is an offshoot of the UN. But in the current context, it was urgent not to wait, and if we had to endure yet another episode of international misunderstanding and bureaucratic delays, we won’t complain.

What about data privacy? We’re still waiting for more details in this area.

And, above all, what about the mechanism that will allow laboratories to load proof of vaccination into the system? If the system takes a long time to deploy, or only concerns a fraction of them, it will be useless. And what criteria will be used to certify them?

Still on the subject of loading proofs of vaccination, how burdensome will the system be for those who vaccinate? Will it be easy to implement?

The question is whether doctors who vaccinate the French will be able to inform Travel Pass easily, or whether a number of players will be excluded from the system.

And we’re not even talking about the a posteriori regularization of people who will have been vaccinated before the deployment of the system, which doesn’t look like a piece of cake and has the smell of administrative chaos.

In short, the tools for recovery are being put in place, but we’re still waiting to see how they will work on a large scale. In the meantime, if the vaccine does not become a legal obligation, it may well become a de facto standard.

Image : Passport to travel by REDPIXEL.PL via Shutterstock