Grounded flights, lengthy quarantines and inefficient test and trace regimes have left the travel and tourism industry in ruins.
Globally, the sector is expected to lose at least $1.2tr thanks to the coronavirus pandemic and the UK’s airlines are feeling the pain. British Airways owner IAG has racked up £5.1bn in losses so far this year, while EasyJet plunged into the red for the first time in the year to September, with a £1.3bn annual pre-tax loss.
Hope is finally on the horizon. The first vaccines to tackle Covid-19 could be available within weeks, prompting governments and technology companies to revive the idea of so-called ‘health passports’ to unlock international travel.
Health passports were touted as far back as March when Philipa Whitford, chair of the all parliamentary group for vaccines, said they could help track which workers had contracted the virus already.
In April, biometrics firm Onfido entered into discussions with the Government for the roll out of such passports. At the time, Onfido described the technology as “the linchpin of a new normality”.
The idea was for the passports to bind a person’s digital identity to their Covid-19 test results. A digital identity would be created by uploading a selfie from a user’s phone and verified alongside an official document, such as a driving licence.
But issues around a high volume of false positives in testing as well as a nationwide shortage of tests curtailed the idea. The advent of vaccines has changed that, says Ismet Geri, chief executive of British biometrics firm Veridium.
“Digital immunity passports are much more viable this time as it was when it was originally discussed with tests such as polymerase chain reaction (PCR)," he says. “Tests are limited in time and need to be renewed almost every couple of weeks, while vaccines we could expect a much longer duration of immunity.”
Vaccination will form the main tenet of the travel industry’s recuperation plans. In the interim, the Government and airlines are starting to roll out digital “freedom passes”.
On Tuesday, United Airlines, Lufthansa, Virgin Atlantic, Swiss International Air Lines and JetBlue said they would begin to offer a digital health-passport known as CommonPass to passengers who could certify they were free of coronavirus.
The move, backed by the World Economic Forum, would involve a digital certificate being downloaded onto a user’s phone that would then be linked to test results, and eventually vaccination status.
What the WEF's Common Pass system will look like
Credit: The Common Trust
Thomas Crampton, chief marketing officer of The Common Trust, which developed the system, compared it to the way all banks use Visa and Mastercard.
“We’ve always said this isn’t about testing, this is about health. The CommonPass is valuable in the era of testing, because you can test it when somebody crosses a border, but it’s essential with vaccines.”
Crampton says the importance of an international standard increases with vaccines because they can’t be done each time someone crosses a border. “I need to be able to verify in a certified way that you have in fact had a vaccination and find out which vaccination it was, what batch it was,” he explains.
Trade group IATA is also working on a health pass of its own alongside BA owner IAG, which is expected to launch in the first quarter of next year.
It too will likely force the hand of those that are uncertain about taking one of the vaccines that are cleared for distribution. One in five people say they are unlikely to be vaccinated against the virus due amid high levels of misinformation among the general public, according to a study from University College London.
Crampton says that airlines forcing people to vaccinate before travelling will be no deviation from common practice.
“The principle of people taking vaccines for entry into a country is something that’s been long established,” he says.
“It’s existed since the 1960s with the yellow fever vaccine and the yellow card. How much of an impact will it have on the overall taking of vaccines? I don’t know.”
Health experts have suggested that take-up of as much as 70pc is needed to create herd immunity with between 80 and 90pc of the population needed for Britain to dismiss the threat of the virus entirely.
Andrew Bud, chief executive of UK biometrics firm iProov, says there will be some scepticism among the use of health passports depending on who makes them.
“I think it’s unlikely that people in the UK will accept health passports unless they are produced by the NHS,” he says.
“NHS Digital is completely competent and capable of doing this, especially given they’ve already rolled out a large-scale digital identity programme at scale.”
“The advent of vaccines means there are two levels on which we need to consider health passports – nationally, and internationally with respect to global travel,” the iProov chief says.
“The national level is the highly problematic one because it is a social and political issue. Will you need a vaccine and be willing to declare it just to go to the pub — or be allowed into your office, for example?”
The race is on now to establish a global standard and deploy technology so the travel industry can get back on its feet.
Britain’s broken aviation and travel industries will certainly be banking on health passports to get planes filled. Indeed the success of such passports could help companies like Airbnb and Booking.com return to former glories as cooped up tourists get ready to take to the air once more.
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