Good morning excellencies, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you to ICAO and Qatar for hosting this forum. I appreciate the opportunity to help set the tone for the important discussions over these coming days.
Facilitation is complex and getting more complex with each new rule or requirement that is added. Complexity has a price—consuming time, adding costs, and limiting capacity. Our aim should be simplicity. The tool that will get us there is technology. And the measure of success is how efficiently processes do their job while meeting customer expectations.
Each year we ask our passengers about their travel expectations.
- They don’t want to spend time in airports. 74% don’t want to take more than 45 minutes to get from curb to plane—faster if they don’t have checked luggage.
- 85% will share immigration data in advance if it helps them get through facilitation processes faster.
- 75% prefer to use biometric identification over traditional paper checks—although concerns remain about data security
- And, about half have experienced e-gates, of which 84% were happy with the experience.
The future that our passengers want is digital. And that expectation will only increase as digitally native generations travel in ever greater numbers.
It should come as no surprise then, that our top priority for facilitation is digital identity. It is the core of building a modern process flow from booking to baggage claim. And we believe it should eventually be paperless.
There is no one stakeholder who can achieve this. It involves airlines, airports, security, immigration, ground handlers, and many more. The only way to achieve a paperless future is to share information in a standardized way that every stakeholder can work with. The global standards that have helped our industry grow to serve over 5 billion people this year will become even more critical when we need to serve 10 billion or 20 billion at some point in the future. So, the role of ICAO in bringing states together to set global standards—with input from the industry’s experience—will only become more critical as we move forward.
But, of course, setting standards is not enough. They must be implemented. There is an important point to make here on how standards are implemented. Using standards drives efficiency. Adding special requirements to standards does not. Every additional piece of data that needs to be collected, every non-standard format that is required, every unique practice, adds complexity and is a step in the wrong direction.
It’s important that we challenge our processes for unnecessary complexity. Having run an airline, I cannot tell you how many times I have heard the excuse “but we have always done it that way” or “it just works that way” when asking about odd or seemingly unusual requirements or practices. The progressive digitalization of aviation has been a great catalyst to cleaning up many practices that have lost their meaning or importance over the decades. And that is a good thing. As travelers, all of you will have witnessed the transformation of airlines since the turn of the century.
If, somehow, a person missed the last 25 years, she or he would hardly recognize travel processes. They would not know what a smart phone is let alone that it could be used to shop for travel, check-in, store your boarding pass, manage your loyalty, or trace your baggage. And while facilitation has changed, with e-gates in some locations for selected categories of travelers and electronic customs declarations in some locations, the basic process of showing a paper passport to an immigration officer has not been revolutionized in the same way. It is changing, but I would argue that the pace of change needs to accelerate.
What stands between where we are today and where we should be in the not-too-distant future?
- We must ensure interoperability of digital ID standards. Harmonizing the EU and ICAO approach to the standards for digital ID will surely avoid unnecessary costs and provide a better passenger experience.
- We must each play our role and understand our capabilities. For example, governments cannot expect airlines to be immigration officers. If a passenger meets admissibility criteria, airlines should not be penalized if immigration authorities eventually determine that they don’t want the person within their borders. Airline agents cannot be seen as an extension of a country’s border force.
- I believe that international travel would be much better served if governments interacted with travelers directly. They could do this via comprehensive user-friendly digital portals that could grant visas, check admissibility criteria such as those for immigration, health, customs and security. This started with some governments during the COVID years. While we don’t want to go back to those dark days, it gave us valuable experience to build upon. And let’s remember that all airlines need to know is if they can board a passenger or not. The rest is between the passenger and the government.
- Regulatory harmonization is essential. If a government requires airlines to collect and transmit passenger data (API for example), then that practice should not fall foul of any relevant country’s data privacy laws. In some cases this is still not totally clear. Ideally, this would lead back to my previous point of comprehensive government portals to facilitate travel directly with the passenger. Until that happens, airlines will comply with data collection and transmission requirements. But we need the legal certainty of harmonized regulatory processes to do that. And I will emphasize that the more we can eventually make a direct process between travelers and the authorities, the better. Airlines don’t want to collect or hold any more data than is needed to accept the traveler for boarding.
- And lastly, we must prioritize how each stakeholder uses its limited resources to gain the most benefit. An example would be eliminating the need for crew visas—people who we know well and whose travel is clearly for operational purposes. This takes airline and government resources to manage—resources that could be focused on people we know far less about than airline crew.
The great attendance at this event is encouraging. The challenge will be turning interest into actions that harmonize processes with global standards and technology so that travelers have great experiences while governments and the value chain improve their efficiency. I look forward to a robust discussion.