IATA Travel Pass aims to help restart aviation industry

KUALA LUMPUR: The International Air Transport Association (IATA) foresees its newly-developed IATA Travel Pass as one of the key enablers in reviving the aviation industry, which had been badly affected by the Covid-19 pandemic.

The IATA Travel Pass is a global and standardised solution to validate and authenticate travel regulations in all countries and enables passengers to find information on travel, testing and vaccine requirements for their journey, among others.

Regional director for airports and external relations Vinoop Goel said IATA’s current priority is to ensure that the airline industry -- especially international air travel -- gets back on its feet, as many airlines are facing financial struggles.

“For us, we are not looking at this app as a big revenue generator; we will try to keep the cost as minimum as possible and to just barely cover our development cost for this tool.

“The plan is to launch the app in both Android and iOS,” he said in a virtual media briefing on the IATA Travel Pass.

He said IATA is also engaging with airports on the checkin process to ensure smooth passenger flow.

“Some of the airports are very supportive of this (effort),” he said.

IATA’s Asia Pacific Regional vice-president, Conrad Clifford said he is confident that governments across the region would adopt the mechanism to protect the people’s health and wellbeing.

“We are trying to create a global standard here. We hope that by having created the Travel Pass, any other framework providers will be using the same logic or framework, so we don’t have many different versions of the same tool,” he said.

Among other things, the travel pass allows passengers to find testing centres and labs at their departure and/or arrival location that can conduct Covid19 tests in accordance with the type of test required for their journey.

It also enables passengers to create a ‘digital passport’ which verifies that their test/vaccination meets the regulations, and allow them to share the test or vaccination certificates with authorities to facilitate travel.

IATA said it could also be used by travellers to manage their travel documentation digitally and seamlessly throughout their journey.