The IATA application can restart international flights without quarantine

A new application, scheduled to launch within weeks, may mark the first step to resume international travel without quarantine.

The International Air Travel Association (IATA) travel app will allow governments and airlines to digitally collect, access and share information about the status of the Covid-19 test and vaccination of individual passengers.

The industry body, of which 290 airlines are members, said the tool would bring greater “efficiency” to health documentation checks, while accelerating the recovery of the hard-hit travel industry.

“It’s really about digitizing an existing process,” Nick Careen, IATA’s senior vice president for passenger cargo and airport security, told CNBC on Wednesday.

“This is the way to go, because if we do the manual processing, we will stop grinding the minute we start to see a restart,” he said.

Singapore Airlines will be the first airline to fly the tool on an end-to-end route from London Heathrow. Thirty other airlines, including Air New Zealand, as well as Emirates and Etihad in the United Arab Emirates, are scheduled to conduct tests during March and April.

IATA is not alone in the development of so-called digital health passports to restart international travel. International agencies, governments and technology companies are also contributing. But Careen said he expects the application to set a “minimum set of requirements” to allow for more interoperability.

“Eventually, you will see several people in this space,” he said, “but we are defining the baseline in terms of what the standard needs to be.”

With the new app and continuous vaccine launches, the global airline association estimates that travel could reach around 50% of 2019 levels by the end of this year.

Analysts had expected a greater increase in travel in early 2021, but the continued spread of the virus and the emergence of new strains have dispelled those expectations.

“This is the current economic forecast,” said Careen. “There are many variables that influence this.”