(TAN): Passengers at Berlin Brandenburg Airport can now have fast access to the priority security control via a separate lane using facial recognition instead of showing their boarding pass. The airport has launched a digital service for biometric access control called BER Traveller for this purpose.
Lufthansa Group Airlines Lufthansa, SWISS, Austrian Airlines, Brussels Airlines and Eurowings’ HON Circle Members and Senators can avail of the new service at Berlin Brandenburg Airport, Lufthansa said in a news release.
The only requirement for passengers to use BER Traveller is a one-time registration of their biometric data in the service provider’s app, FastID. Passengers will receive an invitation via email from their airline. The next step will be making the use of BER’s self-service machines, boarding at the gate and access to the Lufthansa Group Lounge possible via facial recognition.
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Heike Birlenbach, head of customer experience at Lufthansa Group, said: “We are improving our passengers travel experience in the long-term through contactless, biometric services since they make airport processes simpler and more efficient.”
Thomas Hoff Anderson, COO at Flughafen Berlin Brandenburg, said: “We are pleased to have persuaded the Lufthansa Group, one of our most important customers, of the great potential of facial recognition for smarter passenger processes at BER…. FastID is the right partner to help us make departures from BER faster and easier thanks to the opportunities offered by digital facial recognition.”
The use of the new biometric service is completely voluntary. Personal and biometric data is stored decentrally in the passenger’s app. Passengers who have registered in the app decide again before each journey whether they want to use the service for the next flight. Only then will the data (flight data and biometric identifiers) and the photos taken later at the airport be transmitted in encrypted form to FastID for comparison. After the flight, the data is deleted from FastID and remains solely in the passenger’s app. Passengers have full control over the data in the app and can delete it completely at any time.
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Verification at the process points is carried out by taking photos using permanently installed cameras at the process points and matching the photos with the biometric passenger data from the app (facial recognition) by FastID.
Albert van Veen, managing director of FastID, said: “The implementation at BER Airport represents a new era of identity control in travel – an era that is fully decentralised and gives individuals control over their own data.”
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