IT is evident that Covid has forced us out of our comfort zone – from writing about travel tech, we’ve had to speak to psychiatrists (how to manage fear), learn about viruses and transmissions (ad naseum) and last week, interviewed a medical doctor on stage to find out how vaccinations would help us open borders in Asia.
The fight to open borders will no doubt be a protracted one – it is so full of intricacies and complexities the head spins – but we are comforted by the fact that the role of technology, at its most beautiful, is to simplify things.
Look at how the iPhone, from its launch on June 29, 2007, has changed everything by simplifying everything and changing all our lives.
And nothing is in dire need of more simplicity for a traveller to use than a travel pass or vaccine passport that sits in his or her mobile phone, either on its own or within an airline app, or whichever manifestation it takes.
The final outcome has to be “easiest for travellers to use, easiest for medical providers to use, and trusted by governments”.
Technology has to connect those dots.
Wasn’t it the late Steve Jobs who said, “You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future.
Having now done pilots of travel passes, those organisations developing them have some dots to connect – probably not a whole lot since air travel is still so limited in Asia Pacific – but hopefully enough to know what needs to be done and according to Vinoop Goel, Asia-Pacific regional director of airports & external relations, IATA, one lesson learnt is to remove paper from the process.
The reality though, is it will be messy at first before it gets better. The good thing is, we have all gotten used to messy as we lived life through the pandemic. The starts, stumbles and shutdowns we’ve all experienced has made us stronger and dare I say, more patient that we’ve ever had to be.
So we can’t expect a fullproof, bulletproof solution immediately. We just have to be prepared to trial it, test it (again and again), improve it (again and again) – technology is not a destination, it’s a journey.
Look at the different generations of iPhones we’ve all had to buy over the years … each one an incremental improvement, not a quantum leap. Perhaps the next quantum leap is a smartphone that launches us into space with a swipe …
It isn’t only Asia of course that’s grappling with travel passes or vaccine passports to open borders although we are probably more in dire need because so much of our travel is intra-regional, and so many destinations here are reliant on inbound tourism because their whole infrastructure was built for an inbound, not local, visitor.
In the US, domestic travel never actually stopped, said Julie Kyse, global vice president of air partnerships, Expedia Group, and with the fast vaccination rollout, she’s seeing lots of pent-up demand for warm weather destinations such as Florida and Mexico, which kept borders open throughout the pandemic.
My colleague Arnie Weissmann, editor in chief of Travel Weekly, has also been observing the development of travel passes in allowing Americans to travel further afield, and he tells me he’s been pretty impressed with the CommonPass thus far.
This is what he said, “The winner’s circle will include the health passport app whose verification programme is the most trustworthy and complete. CompassPass is, to my knowledge, the one that is investing the most time and energy into building a comprehensive verification network. Wide adoption is certainly a necessary component, but when push comes to shove, countries will want to know that what is reported within an app is reliable.”
When I asked IATA’s Goel what it was doing about verification, he said, “Unlike other systems the IATA travel pass is built around personal data privacy principles without a central database and ensures the security of the test certificates by design. And we have the option of the passenger sending his/her data to governments directly.”
The truth is, competition is healthy, it makes everyone step up their game. The iPhone wouldn’t be what it is without Samsung, Huawei and other competitors snapping away at its chips.
While the back end is being worked at, and refined, you then have to connect the dots to the consumer. And here, travel intermediaries – GDSes, OTAs, meta-searches, travel marketplaces – have a vital role to play.
They are the ones that need to get the information out to the consumer at large and in a way, preserve their position in the value chain. Consumers have to feel confident that buying from a third party (online or offline) when borders open is going to be as reliable as buying from a supplier direct.
These intermediaries have to constantly aggregate information and ensure the information they deliver to the consumer at their front end is as accurate and updated as possible. And you can imagine the gargantuan task here with ever changing, and different, regulations. But make no mistake, in speaking to OTAs and meta-searches, this is one task they are taking on with great zeal and fervour, and applying their creativity and technology smarts to the task.
Indeed, tech adoption by the travel industry has seen an acceleration during Covid, Kyse singled out the example of American Airlines, which continued to fly to the Caribbean through the pandemic, using the VeriFLY pass. It installed 21,000 touchless check-in kiosks in two weeks. “There’s a lot of momentum and velocity happening,” she said.
Steve Saxon from McKinsey, making his observations from Shenzen, China where he is based, said a lot of internal processes had been automated. “Demand is so volatile, the booking window which is already short is even shorter, you have to be able to pick up early signals and put on the right flight at the right time at the right price, using analytics as they’ve not been used before.”
It’s heartening to know that a lot of brains are at work trying to connect the dots – we’ve lived through this pandemic for more than a year, travel has happened somewhere in the world as limited as it is, and we should have enough dots to hopefully connect in the future to open up travel.
Curious, I looked at the UNWTO Tourism Recovery Tracker, to see how much global travel had dropped and it showed that as of December 2020, international tourist arrivals dropped by 74%. In 2019, travel connected 1.46 billion of us in 2019.
A lot of dots to bring back.