Air Canada flights from Vancouver to Toronto will trial a streamlined passenger clearance strategy using the Air Canada mobile application.
Passengers also travelling through Vancouver International Airport for flights to Winnipeg and Toronto’s Pearson International Airport have experienced smart border controls where their ‘faceprint’ is captured to authorise their journey to the plane and disembarking at the other airport.
The best use of biometric technology is enabling fraudsters to be set back in their pace at creating fraudulent documents and circulating them within the travel ecosystem, so that passengers obtain false documents. Face recognition capabilities of e-gates nowadays can ensure the safest practice with using passports, which are matched in airport databases to the passenger’s facial biometrics.
Passengers that don’t wish to use facial recognition can still opt for boarding passes and government-issued IDs whilst travelling on Air Canada services. The passengers opting to use the Air Canada app will register their digital “faceprint” and information in advance to travel before appearing at security e-gates. This option offers convenience of the traveller to have a digitalised record of their passport information in the app, but the data is only retained by Air Canada for up to 36 hours and requires additional consent for use on the travel day.
The data is encrypted and the customer owns their data on their mobile phone.
Craig Landry, Executive Vice President and Chief Operations Officer at Air Canada said: “Many of our customers already utilise digital credentials to simplify their daily activities such as unlocking mobile phones, entering workplaces, verifying identification during financial transactions and more”.
“We are very excited to now take a leadership position in Canada and test digital identification using facial recognition technology to validate customer identification quickly, securely and accurately at select airport touchpoints”.
