Ditch queues, says tourism body
The close to 7 million passengers who fly between Australia and New Zealand annually could see their travel time slashed if proposed border reforms are adopted.
A Tourism and Transport Forum Australia (TTF) report released yesterday says transTasman air travel could be greatly simplified by reforms to border processing, including immigration pre-clearance at the point of departure, and integrated terminals handling both domestic and international flights.
TTF chief executive Margy Osmond said that continually expanding terminals was not the way to cope with continued visitor growth.
She said it was time to ditch archaic border processing methods and use facial recognition technology linked to travel documentation to drastically reduce the time spent in queues.
‘‘Known as ‘Face on the Fly’, this system would identify transTasman passengers as they pass various points between baggage check-in and boarding their aircraft without them needing to stop or produce passports, travel documents or even boarding passes.
‘‘Using information provided before departure this system would also enable the majority of passengers to collect their luggage from a domestic-like reclaim area, and leave without further formalities.’’
Osmond said this would potentially enable many trans-Tasman air services to operate from integrated domestic/international terminals.
The report, produced by Airbiz Aviation Strategies, said the New Zealand Government was considering following the example of Australia, which in July did away with the need for passengers to fill out departure cards.
Kiwi border security agencies were also trialling express processing for frequent transTasman business travellers who are New Zealand citizens with nothing to declare.