My take on international travel and transit during Covid-19

Recently, I’ve taken a trip from London Heathrow to Cyprus via Munich with Lufthansa. Here’s some of the takings I’ve had from this trip.

Post-Covid travel will feature lots of paper

Over the past decade, we’ve become accustomed to the digitalisation of flying – whether it is digital boarding passes, frequent flyer cards or tracking your boarding times. Now, however, there is a huge amount more documentation required to travel. If I take travel my journey, it required:

• A passenger locator form (also dubbed FlightPass in Cyprus)

• Covid Vaccination Certification

• Negative Covid Test (Rapid Lateral Flow or PCR)

This is on top of any existing documentation like visas which may be required. Although I am generally a “tech first” person – keeping track of all these documents on a mobile isn’t easy, so I’ve resorted to printing off all my documents. It’s backwards, but it makes it far easier to handover, doesn’t require an internet connection and ensures that Covid particles aren’t transferred if your phone was touched by gate agents or border guards.

Repetitive, lengthy processes

I understand that documents have to be checked during travel. Airlines, such as Lufthansa, will get fined if they allowed people without the correct documentation to travel whether that is a visa or Covid passes. This makes sense. What doesn’t is repeating these processes two or three times on the same journey. During both the in- and out-bound journeys, I had my documents verified at check-in, boarding for the second flight and at the border. This wastes a huge amount of time when the documents have been checked right at the beginning. At Munich, you had to get a sticker on your boarding pass to show you had been “verified” with a small handwritten note of the date. It is a waste of time for both passengers and staff.

Airlines must have a lot of staff under utilised

Doing the above processes do not only take a lot of time but require a large amount of labour because they require humans to process the document checks. Both at Heathrow and Munich, Lufthansa occupied two gates – one for the flight to depart from and the other for document checks. This could suggest two things:

• There must be a lot of staff that have not returned to flying as there was a total of six agents at the gate. Usually there is only two who oversee the boarding process.

• Lufthansa, and airport operators, are still struggling to return to the full gamut of flights on offer versus 2019 by utilising spare gates for document checks.

There is some hope for streamlining…

All these document checks are not enjoyable. However, I do have some hope that as time goes on airlines, governments and airports will work to implement two key pieces of technology to streamline the process. Firstly, the technology framework for the European Union Digital Covid Certificate is enabling verifiable Covid passes across the bloc and are sharing this technology to allow third countries to connect into their systems for cross-border checking. Third countries that have signed up include Turkey and, in the near future, the UK. This should allow, for example, a border guard in Spain or Switzerland to scan an NHS Covid Pass from the UK with no technical integration problems. This should then also link into solutions such as the IATA Travel Pass. This application will enable users to upload their vaccination pass as well as tests directly into the IATA Travel Pass for verification prior to check in or boarding digitally and without human checks – saving time and reducing delays. This technology has been developed over a number of months and I really that hope that we can get to a situation whereby Travel Pass or the DCC become commonplace globally to ensure frictionless travel. Perhaps apps like Travel Pass could also extend to replace Yellow Books that are required to show vaccination against other diseases for travel.

Mask usage varies greatly between the UK and Germany

In the UK, face mask wearing of any kind is dropping off a cliff due to the end of these restrictions in July.  In recent reports, usage in railway environments is now as low as 20%. This starkly compares to Germany where masks are still required in almost all public environments. Not just this, but they have to be more protective medical or FFP3/KN94 masks to ensure that both the wearers and those around them are protected better. I felt quite safe whilst transiting and onboard due to the high obedience to mask wearing by Germans.

How have you found travel over the past few months? Let us know in the comments below!