The departure area at Cape Town International Airport—my usual embarkation point these days—has had a set of self-service kiosks for South African passport holders for about two years now.
They have yet to become operational. An old sign says they will be… “soon.”
Although facilities to cross an international border without engaging a customs official have long been a feature of travel in Europe, they are rare elsewhere. And even where they are, a physical passport is still required.
Passports are an anomaly in today’s digital world. Nearly everything else—drivers’ licenses, medical insurance cards, and similar IDs—have migrated to digital versions you can carry around on your smartphone. Even these were a bit late relative to ubiquitous digital payments like Apple Pay, Google Pay and the rest.
Now the Baltic country of Croatia plans to roll out a digital passport. Owners of Android phones can download an app, input the relevant information, and use that to pass through Zagreb airport and certain overland border crossings.
So-called Digital Travel Credentials (DTCs) have been under consideration for a while now. In 2018, the World Economic Forum launched a DTC pilot project involving Canadian and Dutch passport holders. The International Commercial Aviation Organization has been exploring DTCs even longer than that.
Other than these exploratory steps, Finland is the only country to implement a digital passport before Croatia—and even then, it was only for use on select flights to and from the United Kingdom. And despite countless working groups and position papers, moves towards widespread adoption of DTCs are unlikely.
The problem is not technological. Instead, the obstacles to DTCs are political and institutional.
On the political side, countries—especially the United States—are reluctant to let go of the security blanket provided by in-person inspections by border officials. There’s a deep-seated bias against allowing people to enter countries without having a face-to-face chat with a stern official behind the counter.
These fears have some foundation in reality. Passport forgery is perhaps not as easy as it appears in spy movies, but it does happen. Migrating to a digital passport would theoretically increase the risk of forgery considerably.
That’s where the institutional obstacles come in. To make DTCs work, participating countries would need to be part of a global database containing biometric information about travelers. Biometric travel databases already exist—in the U.S., the Transport Security Administration and private company CLEAR operate them—but not without widespread concern at the possibility of hacking and compromised personal data. Creating international biometric databases would increase such concerns dramatically.
On top of that, coming up with a global standard for DTC formats and biometric data could take years, if not decades. It took over 20 years of heavy negotiations to create the common reporting system (CRS) for international tax matters, and even now, the U.S.—an aggressive proponent of the CRS—has never ratified it.
Proponents of the DTC focus primarily on the convenience for travelers. But in today’s world that is nowhere near as important as the desire for foolproof security and intelligence at national borders.
I predict it will still be a while before the DTC manages to conquer those concerns. We’ll probably see the emergence of DTC arrangements in regional blocs like the European Union and perhaps at the U.S.-Canadian border.
But if you’re waiting for wider adoption, don’t hold your breath.
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