AirAsia starts system to eliminate boarding passes for domestic flights

AirAsia Group Bhd has introduced a one-time verification system for passengers via its FACES @AirAsia mobile app which is designed to eliminate the need for boarding passes and passports.

FACES is a facial recognition boarding system owned and operated by AirAsia, with the purpose of creating a seamless travel process for guests.

In a tweet today, AirAsia group chief executive officer Tan Sri Tony Fernandes said passengers will only have to register their faces and passports once on its @AirAsia mobile app.

Once passengers have scanned their faces and passport details on the app, and AirAsia ground staff have verified them, the passengers will be able to travel seamlessly, he said.

“Then you are ready to never use a boarding pass again and you can walk through our gates for domestic flights,” he said, adding that the facility is currently available in certain airports like Senai.

“This can be rolled out in all airports if only we had partners who supported us and all our digital initiatives,” he said.

This facility follows in the footsteps of British Airways’ (BA) biometric boarding gate trials last year in the US which eliminated the need for boarding passes and passports at boarding.

Last November, BA began testing self-service boarding gates in Los Angeles Airport that did not require customers to produce either their boarding pass or their passport.

Instead, passengers only need to look into a camera, wait for their biometric data to be checked against their passport, visa or immigration photos and then walk onto the plane once their identities have been verified.

The trials were initially limited to those flying out of Los Angeles Airport on BA flights to Heathrow, but are now being tested at several other US airports.

At 2.57pm, AirAsia rose 1.6% or 4 sen to RM2.53, with 4.29 million shares traded.