The Times They Are a-Changin’ sings Bob Dylan, or Everything changes, sang Mercedes Sosa, but the truth is that few sectors are as changing as the world of travel and, let alone, that of airports.
They know it well in Singapore, where they have the honor of having in their capital one of the best airports in the world, Changi, in the top 20 busiest airports in the world and that until before the pandemic it had ratios of about 68 million travelers per year.
To give us an idea, the Madrid – Barajas airport, the busiest in Spain, has an annual traffic of about 50 million passengers. However, there is a reality that we do not consider when understanding delays at an airport: the moment of the passport.
Unaccustomed to the format of the Schengen Area, which allows citizens of the European Union and some other associated countries to travel simply with an ID, without having to go through passport control, The time we save in this procedure is substantial.
For this reason, the Singaporean authorities have decided to implement by 2024 a radical change at Changi airport: no passport. Not for everyone, obviously, but they are going to implement a biometric system that will eliminate the cumbersome moment of obtaining the passport and physically validating it.
Goodbye passport, hello biometrics
With the method they intend to incorporate, This task will be carried out in an automated manner at Changi Airport, passing immigration control and allowing the passenger to leave for the city with a passport, as reported by Josephine Teo, Minister of Transport of Singapore, in a parliamentary session echoed in EFE.
It will be, as stated, biometric technology and a software facial recognition, something that is already done in Changi to a certain extent in the automated immigration queues. This is intended to avoid the tedium of showing your passports several times, slowing down traffic at the airport itself and complicating the experience.
With this they also intend create a single authentication sample that allows you to automate waypoints, including immigration control or boarding itself, without showing identification or boarding passes.
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The bad news is that these changes are only going to be carried out in Changi and that It is unknown for what type of users or citizens it will be available —everything indicates that only for Singaporeans themselves—, in addition to the fact that in the rest of the world it will continue to be necessary to use passports or identification systems.
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