Brisbane Airport has partnered with SITA and Air New Zealand, to launch a trial of the SITA Smart Path facial recognition technology.

It allows passengers to identify themselves throughout the journey using biometrics–from check-in to boarding—without requiring boarding passes, passports or other travel documents to be presented at each waypoint.

The SITA Smart Path system integrates with the airport’s existing common-use infrastructure, kiosks and boarding gates, linking travel documents to the biometric data.

Passengers are first scanned at a self-service kiosk during the check-in process, and later an automated boarding gate verifies identity using face recognition technology before granting access to the plane.

Air New Zealand passengers are the first to trial Smart Path at the airport, which plans to expand the service to other international airline customers who employ the common-use platform in the coming months.

Roel Hellemons, general manager strategic planning and development, Brisbane Airport Corporation, says:

“This is a great opportunity for passengers to help shape the future of travel.

“We’re always striving to improve the airport experience at Brisbane Airport and this trial will allow us to test and refine new technology that we hope will make standard check-in and boarding processes more efficient and secure in the very near future.”

Sumesh Patel, SITA president, Asia Pacific, says:

“Australia has long been recognized as a leader in secure border management and passenger processing. Now Brisbane Airport is leading the way with SITA Smart Path.

“This is a single, secure, self-service process which simplifies passenger processing for everyone – airlines, airports and border authorities. It is early days but already the response from passengers has been positive.”

The Smart Path system could be used for other journey checkpoints which require verifying identity, including border management. Brisbane Airport and SITA will work together over the coming months to trial the technology in a variety of scenarios.

SITA says:

“Any airport and any airline using any common-use platform can use Smart Path.”

The airport technology specialists has in excess of 1,000 self-boarding lanes around the world which could support the Smart Path biometric system. Its common-use systems serve more than 100 million passengers per year.

SITA also provides border management solutions to more than 30 Governments, including Australia and New Zealand.

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