SINGAPORE, SINGAPORE – EVENT 11: A group of Singapore Airlines flight crew come to the … [+]
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New COVID-19 vaccines hitting the market are shaping up the way travelers will soon take to the skies. This week, Singapore Airlines announced that it will be the first major organization to begin testing of COVID-19 digital testing, a process that will help streamline and validate the process for being sharing vaccine and test status.
Already, many air carriers and destinations require air passengers to have a negative COVID-19 test in their hands before arriving at the airport or before boarding a flight. But the process of getting test results and sharing those with the carrier is a bit misleading. Different test sites deliver different levels of paper while verifying the results fall on front-line airport staff. The lack of structure ends bureaucratically and invites uninformed parties to misrepresent test or vaccine results.
Because of these concerns, new digital vehicles for sharing and validating test results are rapidly reaching the market. At the user level, apps like CommonPass have recently taken hold to help travelers catalog and share health information. At the establishment stage, however, the International Air Transport Association, or IATA, is also launching a broader campaign. Launched in November, the new Travel Pass Initiative (TPI) provides a framework for passengers, test facilities and airlines to capture and share test and vaccination requirements with integrity.
Singapore Airlines, by extension, is the first air carrier to change these standards and implement a new customer verification process based on the IATA TPI framework. Using the new standard, recipients of a negative test or vaccine will receive a digital or paper QR code to take to the airport. There, employees can scan that QR code and verify the validity of the data through a backend database handled by IATA.
Initially, the new service will be extended to regional flights from Kuala Lumpur or Jakarta to Singapore, the airline’s headquarters. If the trials go well, however, Singapore plans to extend the program to other parts of its network. Singapore also plans to incorporate the framework into its mobile app halfway through the year, cutting one hurdle out of the process.
As more airlines and destinations work through the process of checking and allowing passengers to enter air travel corridors, processes such as the IATA framework and the use of Singapore will become commonplace. And how some carriers like Qantas are advertising a future in which only Vaccinated passengers can fly, the integrity of these systems will be properly built at a critical scale.