Health pass app ready to take off

The Airport Authority has finished the trial of a digital health pass at Hong Kong International Airport aimed at increasing efficiency of health document checks.

It was conducted with Los Angeles International Airport and Cathay Pacific. Other partners included The Commons Project, one of the major digital health pass developers for international travel, and Prenetics, a Covid-19 test provider.

Various countries have imposed requirements on visitors amid the pandemic. Hongkongers returning from overseas, for example, are required to present documents of having tested negative within 72 hours before boarding.

In the trial, air crew members of Cathay role-played as passengers and took the test at the airport's testing center. Results were sent to passengers through an app and in the form of digital health pass, which is presented on check-in.

On arrival at LAX, the passengers presented their pass to staff for validation and entered Los Angeles successfully.

"As tests and vaccinations are poised to become new essentials for travelers, a digital solution is required to effectively integrate this new requirement into the existing digitized travel process, from laboratory to check-in and to landing," said Vivian Cheung Kar-fay, the authority's executive director of airport operations.

"Resumption of safe air travel is our top priority. Traffic recovery is hard to be sustainable with manual handling of paper records without error to match requirements of each country, which also change from time to time," she said.

This comes as the European Union is set to unveil a vaccine passport scheme to allow travel this summer and support the struggling tourism sector, despite disagreement between member states over the proposal.

The European Commission is proposing a digital green certificate that would combine data on vaccination, Covid tests and recovery to allow people to take flights and cross borders within the bloc.

The commission is working to have it done by June.