Scanning technologies have matured significantly. Machine Readable Zone (MRZ) readers are fast, accurate, and cost-effective. Optical Character Recognition (OCR) has evolved from specialized hardware into a readily available smartphone API, significantly increasing the airline industry’s confidence in travel document checks. However, this shift also led the industry to become highly proficient at asking the wrong questions.
The most common question when evaluating the right solution to use for travel document check is typically around the accuracy of the data extraction. Whereas airlines should be asking: what are we trying to achieve here and is this solution able to deliver it at the scale and the demographics we are operating?
The answer to these questions can be very different, and the difference is exactly what causes fines, passengers denied boarding, broken processes, and missed commercial opportunities.
Airlines are in need of technology capturing travel document and passenger data digitally for different reasons, and not every solution fits every objective. Before deciding on the right solution, an airline first needs to be honest about what problems they are trying to address:
While these objectives are closely related, the solutions required for each differ significantly. In some cases, objectives even conflict with one another. A solution designed to address one may inadvertently undermine another. For example, an airline that focuses solely on data accuracy may partially achieve one objective, but with limited overall effectiveness.
The MRZ is developed under ICAO Document 9303 and adopted by 193 member states. The wide adoption is a huge enabler for the industry’s ability to process passengers. An MRZ reader processes the data captured in milliseconds with almost perfect accuracy and what it tells you is not without its limitations.
Here is what the MRZ gives you:
Here is where it falls short:
Unfortunately, this not an edge case that’s negligible. Many countries do not classify their documents using the 2nd character of the MRZ, creating a vulnerability for any system relying on it to encounter misclassification, and potential fines.
For some airlines, most of travel documents they will encounter are MRZ documents. However, this is not the case for all. For some airlines, most of their travel document checks must involve non-MRZ documents, especially on certain routes.
Many countries issue visas or especially eVisas in formats that are not aligned with ICAO standards, such as residence permits, emergency travel documents, and many more non-standard documents. If an airline needs to process these documents manually, most of the objectives we mentioned above would fail.
The practical advice here is quite simple but challenging to execute. Before applying the right solution, analyse your actual demographics and the documents carried by your passengers. Look at your network, identify the problematic routes, their impact on your operations, the challenges they pose for your objectives and the potential solution for each. Some do not even require a scanning solution.
Timatic holds this exact information: what documents are needed and are most common for each of your routes. You can use that insight to ask the right questions to any solution provider.
Although this distinction is clear to most, its implications are not fully recognized.
Typical scanning solutions do not know what to do with the data. They don’t know where to start, or how to proceed. They don’t know what to ask the passenger to scan next. They don’t know when the travel requirements require manual intervention. So, most get stuck with a simple passport and visa scan, that may cover a varying portion of your passengers on each route.
Think about what processing a passenger correctly actually involves. A passenger who is exempt from a visa requirement because they are married to a national of the destination country cannot prove this through any travel document scan. Do you ask them to scan a marriage certificate? And if so, does your scanning technology recognize all marriage certificates, or registered partnerships which are treated differently across jurisdictions? Even if they do, how do you keep up with governments changing regulations that might create the need for capturing a completely different document tomorrow? None of these requirements are edge cases. They are everyday scenarios that Timatic publishes route by route, nationality by nationality. And none of them can be addressed by scanning solutions alone.
The right response to these scenarios is not to abandon off-airport processing. It’s to build a compliance flow that knows its own limits. Some requirements can be addressed by training the underlying AI to recognise non-standard documents. Some can be handled by uploading a document for expert review, still off-airport. Some can be addressed by a simple acknowledgement by the passenger confirming they hold the required document, and the airline records that confirmation. Some of these may not be complete solutions but it could be far more beneficial than checking them manually at the airport.
There is no magic technology that can solve all the objectives we mentioned above. The optimal answer is a layered structure that addresses the pain points through various levels of solutions:
Not every airline needs every layer from day one. But every airline needs to be honest about which layers its current solution is missing, and which of its objectives those missing layers are preventing it from achieving.
This is why we built Timatic Doc Scan with the flexibility needed to make sure it fits your objectives by covering the full range of capabilities from the most basic to the most advanced. The real difference is that it's seamlessly embedded with Timatic AutoCheck, so the scanning and the compliance intelligence are not two systems talking to each other, but are the same system. And because it can be configured by route and passenger demographics, airlines are not forced into a one-size-fits-all approach. You can dial up or down the level of verification where it makes sense, keeping the process lean where complexity is not required, and strict where it is, optimizing cost and user experience at every step.
