How many times have you experienced long waiting hours for a layover or long checking in hours, or even when you are in a rush but printing the boarding pass takes time? While beginners to flight journeys wouldn’t probably mind, experienced fliers would want to avoid it at all costs. It doesn’t matter whether they are on comfy flights from Canada to India or to anywhere from anywhere.
Thankfully, the Government of India launched DigiYatra on 1st December, 2022. One may ask what it is about. We’ll explain. DigiYatra is, in official terms, a Biometric Enabled Seamless Travel (BEST) experience where the government provides paperless travel to passengers based on facial recognition technology.
In India, you can find DigiYatra being used at Bengaluru, Varanasi, Pune, Delhi, Kolkata and Hyderabad airports. Currently, it is not mandatory to use DigiYatra for passengers and can be used voluntarily for free. It also reduces the check- in time drastically so we don’t see a reason not to adopt it where available. We wish to improve by activating the service at all Indian airports and international destinations as well.Right now, it is only available for domestic routes of flights.
DigiYatra also has an app available in Google Play Store for Android and iOS users. The app links the flier’s boarding pass to the FRS, i.e. The Facial Recognition System, which confirms their identity. Apart from this, technology around the aviation industry has been improving by leaps and bounds across the world.
Even when the pandemic forced us to go contactless, many safety measures were introduced to keep everyone safe. These ranged from smart check- ins, digitized security gates and many more such steps to ensure everyone followed the guidelines. However, and we come with more good news, you should also know that there are a few other airports around the world which have changed to biometric boarding than printed paper passes for all types of flights, including cheap first class flights.
Now without further ado, let us get to the airports of the world where you do not need to print out a boarding pass to travel via air.
- India- Bengaluru, Delhi, Varanasi, Hyderabad, Kolkata and Pune Airports
- Tokyo, Japan- Narita International Airport and Haneda International Airport
- Malaysia- Kuala Lumpur International Airport
- France- Orly Airport and Paris Charles de Gaulle Airport
- Hong Kong- Hong Kong International Airport
- United Arab Emirates- Abu Dhabi International Airport and Dubai International Airport
- United Kingdom- Heathrow Airport and Manchester Airport
- Spain- Josep Tarradellas Barcelona-El Prat Airport
- Germany- Munich International Airport and Frankfurt Airport
- USA
The usual way this works is by submitting the passenger’s identification, uploading a selfie picture and the boarding pass details. Once at the airport, passengers use electronic gates that use facial identification of sorts to verify the passenger instead of using boarding passes. This makes the process that much smoother and hassle free for the fliers, especially those on international flights, long haul flights, red- eye flights or cheap last minute flights. So if you are planning to travel to one of the above locations, don’t forget to check it out!
Also Read: Travelling To India From Canada: Travel Guidelines for Covid-19
