CHINA/US. Airport Authority Hong Kong, together with its business partners and Los Angeles International Airport, has completed the trial of a digital health pass at Hong Kong International Airport (HKIA).
The system aims to provide a simple and efficient means of health document check and verification process at both ends of a passenger journey.
The trial was conducted in cooperation with Cathay Pacific, The Commons Project – one of the major digital health pass developers for international travel – and Prenetics, a COVID-19 test provider, as well as partner airport Los Angeles International.
In the trial, air crew members of Cathay Pacific role-played as passengers, taking the COVID-19 test at HKIA’s testing centre. Test results were sent to these passengers through a mobile application in the form of a digital health pass, which were presented to the airline staff for check-in.
Upon arrival at Los Angeles International, the role-playing passengers presented their digital health pass to local staff for validation, entering the US airport successfully.
Airport Authority Hong Kong Executive Director, Airport Operations Vivian Cheung said: “As COVID-19 tests and vaccinations are poised to become new essentials for air travellers in the future, a digital solution is required to effectively integrate this new requirement into the existing digitalised travel process, from laboratory to check-in and to landing.”
She added: “Resumption of air travel in a safe way is our top priority. Traffic recovery is hard to be sustainable with manual handling of the paper records without error to match the requirements of each country, which could also be changed from time to time. We will continue to work with the industry partners including the Government to make HKIA to be one of the first airports in the world to adopt digital health pass solutions.”
HKIA said it has been collaborating with major hub airports in the world to facilitate the adoption of digital solutions to tackle challenges such as trustworthiness of paper reports, diversified and dynamic entry requirements across countries and regions, long queues for passengers for document check and labour-intensive checking duties for airline staff.
Los Angeles World Airports Chief Executive Officer Justin Erbacci said: “We are working closely with our international airport partners to create standardised protocols that will support the safe return to travel. We applaud our partners at the Airport Authority Hong Kong for successfully piloting a digital health pass as we work together to embrace innovation and technology that will reimagine air travel in response to the global pandemic.”
