SPECIAL REPORT: SUSTAINABILITY
Safe passage SITA’s vice president for border management, Jeremy Springall, explains how technology will play a key role in aviation’s recovery from COVID-19 by helping protect ‘travel bubbles’ from popping.
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n 2020, new vocabulary has seeped into the global consciousness. From ‘new normal’ to the more practical, yet equally disliked, ‘social distancing’, the additions to this year’s dictionary paint a bleak, dystopian picture. But in recent months, fresh terms are being met with interest from wanderlust-stricken travellers and cautious optimism from governments and businesses hoping to rebound from the economic damage of COVID-19. ‘Travel bubbles’, ‘travel corridors’ and ‘air bridges’ are terms to describe formal agreements between governments allowing travellers to bypass strict quarantine measures based on the countries they travel between. It’s a simple but elegant idea to help combat the likelihood of COVID-19 resurgence, in particular second waves sparked by passengers arriving from high-risk regions. In light of this, the air travel industry must focus on transforming the passenger experience to increase traveller safety while balancing economic pressures from slow customer demand. And the technology to achieve this is already available. For example, solutions that allow passengers to use their mobile device as a remote control for touchpoints such as self-bag drop and check-in kiosks, removing the need to touch any airport equipment. A good illustration of this is at San Francisco International Airport, where SITA Flex enables a full mobile and touchless passenger journey. This means travellers can print bag tags from their mobile phone on self-service bag points. SITA and Beijing Capital International Airport (BCIA) also recently unveiled a new extensive biometric deployment of SITA Smart Path, featuring a completely contactless experience for passengers travelling through the airport. As promising as this sounds, the practicality of protecting these bubbles is fraught with technical, operational, and governmental challenges.
Safer and restricted zones Borders across the world are once again being opened for tourists, and the list of countries that are getting back into the travel pool is growing each week. The latest additions to this group include South Africa, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Kosovo. With that said, not all the countries on the list have been removed from other regions’ red lists – South Africa being one example. As countries begin to ease air travel restrictions, they will be very mindful of preventing a resurgence of cases. Governments will therefore want to take a controlled manner to open up their borders and might take different approaches based on the risk profile for each travel corridor destination. Where the virus risk is low, we’re beginning to see specific regions wishing to allow movement within safer zones first, for example the trans-Tasman bubble between Australia and New Zealand which is being discussed. This will enable open travel between countries within the zone, although might still be subject to additional health checks and close monitoring to avoid the risk of outbreaks. There are also countries deemed higher risk, where travel corridors might be restricted to certain categories of traveller or under strict conditions. For example, the Singapore-China ‘fast lane’ corridor. These restricted travel corridors will allow some movement for critical travel, including sponsored business travel. Both models require an information-driven approach based on real-time data and they need to be responsive to handle rapidly changing situations.
AIRPORT WORLD/ISSUE 5, 2020
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