For years, the industry has talked about seamless travel. The traveller’s experience still often begins with the same familiar routine: entering passport details, checking them again, repeating information across different touchpoints, and hoping every system along the way agrees.
Trip.com’s digital identity pilot with the International Air Transport Association, or IATA, brings that conversation earlier into the journey — to the point of booking.
Announced at Trip.com Group’s Airline Global Conference in Amsterdam, the pilot will explore how travellers could use digital identities stored in mobile wallets such as Google Wallet and Apple Wallet to autofill booking details during the booking process, reducing friction and minimising errors.
Air Canada, Turkish Airlines and Qatar Airways are expected to be involved in the pilot, alongside digital identity infrastructure platform Hopae. Future rollout may involve Trip.com users in the US and UK.
The initiative represents one of the early implementations of digital identity technology within the online travel sector. Its significance lies not only in the booking function itself, but in what it signals: digital identity is moving from airport infrastructure discussion into the online travel journey.
The industry is back, but changed
Harry Grewal, Director, Airport Infrastructure & Customer Experience at IATA, placed the discussion within the broader state of aviation recovery.
“The road to recovery — in many cases we’re back to pre-pandemic levels,” he said. “Some markets are performing better than others and there’s no doubt that while overall macro levels showcase that we are back and even surpassing 2019 volumes, both in cargo as well as passenger, the business is different, consumer behavior is different, and even the profile between leisure and business is not what it used to be.”
Passenger load factors have largely recovered, but IATA says the business has changed — and so has traveller behaviour.
That changed environment is important. Load factors may have recovered, but the operating reality has not become simpler.
Harry pointed to pressures including fuel prices, rising aeronautical charges, labour, supply chain issues and regulatory frameworks that “sometimes hinder growth or create operational complexity.” For regions such as Africa, Latin America and Asia Pacific, he said, there are “distinct differences in yield” compared with Europe, North America and the Middle East.
His conclusion was direct: “Our finances are very fragile and we need to continue to innovate, adapt and pivot on an annualized basis.”
The recovery is not evenly distributed. IATA’s regional profit slide showed the uneven financial picture behind the return of demand.
The passenger pain points have not disappeared
Harry then brought the conversation back to the traveller experience.
IATA’s global passenger survey, he said, offers a snapshot of what customers “demand and expect from the industry.” While overall satisfaction is improving, some issues remain persistent.
“Anything that deals with queuing, so border control, passport control, check in, bag drop, that is not a good news story,” he said. “And there’s room for improvement there.”
Baggage, border control and transfers remain key pain points in the traveller journey, according to IATA’s Global Passenger Survey.
The passenger expectation is also rising. Harry said that if a traveller has no checked bag, “the expectation from most customers” is that they should be able to go through all touchpoints and board within 30 minutes. With checked luggage, the expectation is 45 minutes. Even for passengers requiring special assistance, he said, “there should be no scenario where you don’t go through all the touch points and not make it to your gate within one hour.”
Then came the reality check. “I can tell you with the utmost confidence we’re nowhere close to this.”
That gap between passenger expectation and operational reality is where digital identity has to prove its value.
Digital identity becomes part of the value chain
For IATA, digital identity is not a side project. Harry described it as a key enabler for the next stage of the traveller journey.
“Digital identity is becoming vital to our industry,” he said. “It’s an enabler and especially in terms of delivering personalized and seamless connected end-to-end journeys, it’s essential. It’s what our customers actually demand and expect from us.”
This is where the Trip.com pilot becomes relevant. By testing digital identity at the booking stage, the initiative moves verification earlier in the journey, before airport friction becomes visible.
Harry also made clear that the shift cannot sit with airlines alone.
“What’s clear is that this evolution and adoption of digital identity, it’s not just an airline initiative, but a full scale industry value chain transformation.”
That matters because the traveller journey crosses multiple layers: OTA, airline, airport, border control, security and technology providers. A cleaner booking flow is only one step. The larger challenge is whether verified identity can move securely and consistently across the journey.
Travellers will share data — if the experience improves
According to Harry, customer willingness is not the main barrier.
“Based on our results, we’re seeing that well over 80% of customers are willing to share their credentials as well as embrace digital identity, so long as those touch points improve and the experience becomes better.”
That condition matters. Travellers will share if the value is clear: fewer repeated checks, fewer duplicated details and fewer errors pushed downstream.
IATA’s OneID: arriving ready to fly
Harry linked this direction to IATA’s OneID initiative, which looks at digital identity from two areas.
“One is the customer experience, which again is focused on contactless travel using biometrics and digital identity at the airport environment,” he said. “And the second is the digitization of admissibility, which again is looking to simplify and automate many of the airline document check processes.”
The goal, he said, is clear: “Through contactless travel and the digitization of admissibility passengers, our vision is that they arrive at the airport ready to fly.”
That is the wider context for Trip.com’s pilot with IATA: if digital identity can begin at booking, it becomes part of preparing the passenger before they reach the airport.
Interoperability is the hard part
Harry’s strongest warning was about fragmentation.
“Interoperability, I would say, is perhaps the biggest concern I have,” he said. “We’re seeing a lot of innovation, a lot of change, a lot of investment, but if it’s not interoperable, we’re not really moving the dial that much forward. It is fragmented, it is fractured.”
This is the central challenge for digital identity.
If each airline, airport, OTA, wallet or authority builds its own version, the traveller may end up with more processes, not fewer. The success of digital identity depends on whether different systems can recognise and trust the same verified information.
IATA has been testing this through proof-of-concepts. In 2024, it worked with Cathay Pacific on a Hong Kong-Narita round trip involving two customers with different profiles — one requiring a visa, one not — and different biometric technology at both airports.
“Nevertheless, through the proof of concept, we were able to demonstrate that interoperability can be achieved,” Harry said.
In 2025, IATA expanded the test to interline travel, multiple digital wallets and different hardware. “The results were also positive,” he said.
The airport cannot just get bigger
Digital identity also raises a bigger infrastructure question: what still needs to happen at the airport?
Harry said passenger volumes are expected to double by 2041, but the industry cannot simply respond with “more runways, more check-in counters, more baggage carousels.”
“We’re going to have to look and think different,” he said.
He asked whether border control, bag drop and even long-held separations between international and domestic passengers could be rethought in a world where travellers can be authenticated through digital identity and biometrics.
“In this world where we can authenticate, verify through digital identity, through biometrics, do we need to segregate departing international and domestic customers?” he asked.
His point was not that risk and regulation disappear, but that digital identity could change airport master planning itself.
On the panel, he returned to the same issue.
“Can border control be moved off site? Could it be digitized and automated? Can bag drop be moved off site?”
His assessment of current infrastructure was direct: “Existing infrastructure is perhaps fit for decades past environments. We need to move away from being so transactional in what we do and become brokers of experience.”
And then, more bluntly: “Today’s infrastructure is not fit for purpose.”
Trust before scale
For digital identity to move beyond pilots, Harry said the industry needs “collaboration, trust” — not only between airlines and technology partners, but also with control authorities, ICAO and governments.
Asked what value the industry most needs to create for customers, his answer was simple: “For me, it’s the trust framework. Without that, we have nothing.”
That trust has to run across the whole chain: travellers sharing credentials, airlines and airports accepting verified data, governments recognising new forms of verification, and technology partners making the systems connect securely.
Without trust, digital identity is just another feature. With it, it becomes infrastructure.
A practical start
Trip.com’s pilot with IATA will not make seamless travel happen overnight. But it places digital identity at a critical point in the journey: when traveller information first enters the system.
That is why the pilot matters. It links the booking flow to the wider push around OneID, interoperability and trusted digital journeys.
For Harry, the industry’s strength has always been its discipline — processes, rules and standards. But the next phase needs more adaptability.
“In this world, we need to be nimble and adaptive,” he said. “Look at everything that exists and see how that fits in the new world.”
Digital identity is one part of that new world. The test is whether the industry can make it work across the journey — not as another isolated layer, but as a trusted foundation that starts before the airport.
Because sometimes the future of travel is not about adding another layer of technology. It is about removing one unnecessary step before you fly — one less form, one fewer error, and one smoother start to the journey.
