A vision for the contactless passenger journey

Miguel Leitmann, CEO Vision-Box, is participating in the Security & Crisis Management Summit at this year’s ACI Airport Exchange. Ahead of the event, he shared his thoughts on advancing the concept of the contactless passenger journey with Ross Falconer.

Miguel Leitmann, CEO Vision-Box: “As we are building, step by step, the orchestration of an end-to-end frictionless experience for all passengers, in partnership with different key stakeholders, we have designed 100% in-house a new suite of Internet of Things enabled passenger touchpoints.” Copyright: Paulo Segadães

As many airports near passenger capacity limits, new technology could be an efficient, cost-effective way to accommodate the needs of multiple stakeholders.

Advancing the concept of the contactless passenger journey, Vision-Box has introduced the biometric Seamless Gateway concept in collaboration with Amsterdam Airport Schiphol. Indeed, it is a cornerstone of Schiphol’s ‘Digital Airport Strategy’.

“As we are building, step by step, the orchestration of an end-to-end frictionless experience for all passengers, in partnership with different key stakeholders, we have designed 100% in-house a new suite of Internet of Things enabled passenger touchpoints, with the ambition to build a modular, environmentally-friendly, human-centric set of smart devices to process travellers in a contactless mode,” explains Miguel Leitmann, CEO Vision-Box.

“The first experiences we were able to run with participating passengers and airport personnel have confirmed the expected performance, the interest, and the adoption capacity of different demographics and ethnical end-users’ typologies. Now it is time to further connect the dots, and roll-out the next stage of this role-model orchestration process to the benefit of happier customers.”

Advancing the concept of the contactless passenger journey, Vision-Box has introduced the biometric Seamless Gateway concept in collaboration with Amsterdam Airport Schiphol.

In addition to Amsterdam Schiphol, Vision-Box has had the opportunity to trial the technology in Australia for the last 12 months, with the local Border Protection Authority, processing departing passengers out of multiple international airports.

“The results were compelling and allowed us to sustain a robust business-case, both from biometric performance and human-acceptance standpoints,” says Leitmann.

As part of the Australian Department of Immigration and Border Protection’s Seamless Traveller programme, Vision-Box has also recently been awarded a border control project at all Australian airports, for international arrivals.

“This chapter of the programme aims at generalising the use of contactless technology when crossing the border, thanks to the country’s identity management framework,” Leitmann adds. “This unique programme has the ambition to offer passport-less border control processing for 90% of incoming passengers, enabled by a future-proof privacy-by-design architecture and the latest state-of-the-art identification techniques.”

Vision-Box has identified, through different market studies and feedback from its 80+ airport customers, that automation and seamless biometric-based self-service solutions are key in overcoming the natural limits of infrastructure footprints, combined with the critical need to identify people’s movements.

“In addition, digital transformation of governments’ identity management systems is gradually unleashing the potential use of paperless, secured and trusted credentials to authenticate and verify identities at different moments, as we are exponentially in need to prove who we are to be entitled to receive a benefit in return,” Leitmann comments.

These are the pillars of the contactless passenger journey value proposition.

“Privacy by design, single token, flow orchestration, contactless, on-the-move, on-the-fly, One Identity, seamless passenger walkthrough, blockchain, mobileID – a myriad of buzzwords, but what do they really mean? How do we leverage those different technologies and concepts at the service of a more efficient and effective passenger journey management, while guaranteeing security to the citizen? These are the subjects I will address during my intervention at ACI Airport Exchange, and try to make it intelligible to all of us,” Leitmann concludes.


Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *