The New IATA Travel Pass is Revolutionizing the Way We Travel

With air travel comes paperwork and with paperwork comes the panic and inconvenience of making sure you have everything you need to ensure you won’t end up trapped in an airport like Tom Hanks faking a bad accent. This is particularly true in the Age of the Coronavirus - which sounds like a film series we’d absolutely never watch - where many countries have different requirements when it comes to COVID-19 vaccinations and PCR tests. But as the old proverb goes, ‘There’s an app for that’, and in this case that app is called the IATA Travel Pass. What’s more, the IATA Travel Pass has been officially recognised by governments and airlines around the globe, with Saudi Arabia being the latest to join the ranks on August 18th, 2021.

The IATA Travel Pass offers a global registry centralizing all pertinent information to your journey. Passengers can find testing centers and labs at their departure and arrival locations, and have the results sent directly on the app.

The app is based on 'self-sovereign identity', giving passengers a digital wallet to store and manage all of their travel documentation like biometric passports and certifications for COVID-19 tests or vaccines.

Emirates was one of the first airlines to trial the IATA Travel Pass as far back as January 2021, with success seen in March. Over 50 airlines have since come on board, including Etihad Airways, Gulf Air, Turkish Airlines, and Qatar Airways. So we’re not peddling some flash in the pan trend here. If there’s one thing COVID-19 taught us is that the system can always be just a little more streamlined to stop us from stressing out, and hopefully apps like IATA Travel Pass stick around for the long term. We don’t want to open fifty tabs just to find out how to get a PCR test on time ever again. Never again.

The IATA Travel Pass app is available for download on iOS and Android. You can check to make sure your airline is participating in the trial run, and whether they can provide you with instructions on how to use the pass.