International travel regulations change daily, sometimes hourly. Airlines face fines up to USD 10,000 per passenger when a passenger is deemed inadmissible for a missing visa, or an invalid document. Add re-booking fees, hotel nights, management costs, the online outrage and potential brand damage, one mistake can truly wipe out a flight’s profit. Keeping up to date with regulations is crucial to remove, or at least reduce, these costs. But before you hand of the management of this risk-centric activity to AI, it's important to evaluate the challenges, data quality and interpretations, timing, and liability.
Regulations rarely say exactly what they mean. A “visa-free” headline can hide footnotes on diplomatic passports, or layovers for longer than eight hours. Caveats live in annexes, press briefings, or memos which are rarely posted online.
While Large Language Models (LLMs) read faster than any analyst alive and can comprehend a huge amount of context, understand intent, and even do a more diligent job than a lawyer, it requires a deep knowledge and understanding of the travel industry to interpret the regulations. Unless specifically built, it will lack the necessary context to capture the true interpretation of a regulation. The variance in interpretations and terminology among all countries also require a direct communication channel for clarifications with the relevant authorities for accurate travel regulations. To put in more practical terms over an example, if a country waived visas for “tourism”, did that cover cruise-ship crew? The answer may hinge on a cabinet memo that was never uploaded online. While humans could miss this nuance too, an expert that is assessing new or updated regulations can identify this, phone the consulate and log the reply. That judgement will keep an airline from slowing down their operations or increasing their fines. This is one of the fundamental reasons why IATA's Timatic relies on its Passenger Travel Regulations Network consisting of thousands of government authorities, policymakers and airline operatives.
Most travel-rule updates still reach airlines through plain-text NOTAMs, or scanned PDFs and not get published online. Conflicting versions also often surface – one ministry posts stricter wording in its daily bulletin, while another quietly edits yesterday’s page without a timestamp. Feed that inconsistency into any system and bad advice flows straight back out.
Using AI to capture travel regulation can only be as successful as the underlying data. Considering that most information is not even available online, until regulators adopt a more structured and streamlined distribution of regulatory information, full automation of tracking regulatory changes will be limited.
All challenges addressed above, with the use of AI, you could potentially provide instant updates to rule changes. However, the reality of it is still going to be slower. Governments often announce changes hours or days before enforcement and then issue retroactive clarifications after flights start landing and issues start occurring. AI can scrape a website every minute, but you can’t force policymakers to update their policies and publish the information at the same pace.
These gains will reduce workload and catch errors early. Therefore, it’s still an assistant and will be far off from replacing a human verification mechanism for a while yet – not because the development in the technology is not enough, but the underlying data available online is not of sufficient quality. This should not stop organizations to utilize the AI tools available today, however, understanding the limits of what it can and cannot do will determine reliability.
Timatic is the solution to all the shortcomings of AI. A dedicated Compliance Requirements Network—consisting of government authorities, policymakers, airline operatives, and many others, feeds Timatic with regulatory changes and field reports around the clock. Timatic is constantly in contact with this global network also for discussions, clarifications, corrections, and thorough analysis of the regulations to ensure compliance. The regulations only get published when verified sources that IATA rely upon, confirm in writing. Having been trusted by the industry for over 60 years now, the Timatic operations have become a thorough, yet efficient process, resulting in changes being published in the system on average every six minutes.
