Traveller demand alone won’t save the airlines

While airlines may be cautiously hopeful that the summer will enable increased flying, the survival of carriers not only depends on the traveller demand to fill their fleets again, but will also be contingent on their ability to process health certification and seamlessly deliver it to border agencies across the globe. The former will not save them without the latter. Is this something that the industry should be working on as a whole or a point of competitor advantage for those that succeed?

A recent article by Geoff Van Klaveren at Capgemini highlighted the need for airlines to accelerate their digital customer journey as they emerge from the current crisis. Those airlines who are able to fully digitalise the experience for their customers are the most likely to be successful in generating much needed revenue to rebuild their ailing businesses. 

While it may be important for airlines to create what Geoff describes as ‘an Amazon’ buying experience for their customers, it will be critical in scaling up their airport operations as flying recommences. One of the greatest challenges facing airlines as air travel takes off again will be their ability to streamline a much more complex passenger airport process and avoid longer and more costly transaction times checking visas, entry forms, Covid tests and vaccine requirements. There is a real prospect of unmanageably long socially distanced queues for check-in and border control if this verification is not automated in some way. 

While airlines do not decide what makes a customer eligible to fly, they will need to aid customers in finding ways to store and verify the documents that a Government may stipulate as a requirement for both departure and entry. This will be the main aim of newly emerging technology that airlines are testing. It’s not so much about the prospect of the much discussed ‘vaccine passports’, but more about broader digital health certification. Getting this right could be existential for many carriers and will allow not only vaccinated customers to travel, but also those who have merely had the requisite Covid test. Airlines will need every customer they can get and so significant investment in this area will be money well spent.

Not only does the current pandemic seem reluctant dissipate but health experts believe that such pandemics are likely to become a fact of life in the future. Nirvana for the airlines will be an app based platform that can collate and verify health certification and entry forms and then feed all this information directly into their check-in systems and those of border control agencies around the world. It will be APIS data on a grand scale.  

Last week the Global Business Travel Association (GBTA) polled its 680 corporate members to ascertain their feelings about this kind of certification and 72% of corporate travellers in Europe support the introduction of some kind of digital health certificate in order to more easily navigate Covid travel regulations. More than three out of four of these travellers believe that it would aid the resumption of business travel. Only 11% of those questioned felt that digital certification of this kind was a bad idea and more encouragingly most declared themselves to be “comfortable” or “very comfortable” making a business trip having been vaccinated.

This kind of sentiment and the need to future proof their business is clearly not lost on airlines like British Airways, for whom business travel is vital element of its business model. The airline has been early out of the traps by trialling the VeriFLY app with partner airlines, which they believe their customers will increasingly need when travel re-starts. Already 400,000 customers have now downloaded this app across five airlines with 3500 passes being verified daily. However, BA are reluctant to put all their eggs in one basket and believe that, in the medium term anyway, they will have to rely on a variety of methods depending on the destination of an individual passenger. As a result, along with rival Virgin Atlantic, they are also working with IATA on their Travel Pass and trialling the upload of documents directly into their website. 

Major airlines seem to be going in different directions in this area. While carriers like Lufthansa and Delta Airlines are developing their own proprietary portals, BA and American believe greater possibilities lie with external, and possibly more agile, technology providers. Whether you regard this as a competitive differentiator, or an issue that the industry must tackle together, there is little doubt that success in this area will determine the speed and magnitude of the recovery for all airlines. It is a challenge that they cannot ignore.