Face Recognition in Travel Industry: Less Waiting, More Doing

Imagine, after months and months of working diligently, you finally get to go on your once-a-year holiday, and you can’t wait. But once you get to the airport, there is this massive queue of people, documents in hand, waiting for hours just to get through security and board their flight. With the advent of face recognition in travel industry, that no longer has to be a concern.

And that isn’t even all, imagine getting to your hotel, and the moment you enter they have your room personalized to your preferences, and your favorite lunch waiting for you. All of this done without ever having to take out a passport or ID card. All you have to do is bring yourself.

These are just tiny examples of how face recognition can (and in some places already is) enhance the way we travel across the world.

How Hospitality Companies Benefit from Face Biometrics

The benefits that the implementation of facial recognition technology can provide are not limited to just individuals. Businesses can benefit in many ways from utilizing this form of identification and recognition mechanism over conventional documentation as well.

Security

The most obvious benefit for a business that this tech can provide is enhanced security outcomes. What this means is a much lower chance of identity fraud, fooling the business, and unauthorized access to customer’s private data.

This is especially important for businesses like hotels that provide luxury services. In a world where creating fake documentation to pretend to be someone else is widespread, facial recognition for secure customer onboarding and dealing can help a business to make sure that their services are only provided to paying customers.

Personalization

Using Facial recognition in your travel business also allows you to better provide personalized services to your customers, something that is often thought to be an attractive service in the travel world.

This could mean personalized recommendations for returning customers in restaurants around tourist destinations, as well as identifying high-value or VIP clients the moment they enter the business premises for better customer service. Quality provision of personalized services can highly enhance the reputation and subsequently the customer base of a tourist business.

Payments & Transactions

Traveling of course involves a lot more transactions than normal, which also increases the chances of errors, or attempts at fraud. Using facial recognition to make payments instead of cards or cash can thus not only increase transaction speed but also protect the business from theft or loss.

For hospitality, customers can also utilize facial recognition to charge expenses directly to their account instead of needing to use a card or cash each time, making for a much more user-friendly experience.

Data Collection/Analysis

Businesses can also benefit from the use of this tech to enhance their enterprise through more accurate and complete customer data collection and analysis. Facial recognition software for travel use cases is often able to conduct behaviour analysis, like time spent at attractions, frequented places, and purchase patterns.

The system can also be used to build more accurate customer profiles and client personas. This allows for the business to better target their services through more thorough marketing research.

Face Recognition Enhances Travel Itineraries

Believe it or not, biometric travel solutions like face recognition can make your experience better in ways that you might not have even thought of. As a traveler, facial recognition removes the friction in nearly all customer-business scenarios, allowing you to enjoy your holiday each step of the way.

The many points in a travel journey that facial recognition improves include:

Airport Security and Boarding

Passenger identification is one thing that nearly all air travelers complain is a major pain point. This is why many airports are already utilizing facial recognition in travel security. It allows for much faster, automated passenger check-ins, identity verification can happen much faster at security checkpoints and passenger biometrics can be used as a boarding pass instead of a physical one.

Immigration and Customs

Biometric immigration control can greatly increase the speed of one of the traditionally slowest parts of the land-travel experience. Border checkpoints of course involve the national security of more than one country, so it often takes time. Yet using this tech can help to make verifying travelers’ identities against their passports go much faster, and minimize the risk of human error.

Luggage Handling

Travel hubs can minimize the chances of passengers losing their bags by using facial recognition to make sure their bags are correctly tagged and processed. At arrival, this same tech can help with quicker luggage recovery by scanning a passenger’s face and automatically guiding them to the location of their bags.

Hotel Check-ins & Services

Traveler identity verification using face recognition allows for much more seamless check-in at hotels and resorts. Guests can instantly be recognized as soon as they get in, and be directed to their room.

In addition, detecting a customer’s face on entry also allows hotels to offer personalized services, usually based on their preferences during their previous stays or demographics-based data for new customers.

Car Rentals

Many people often opt for rental cars when traveling in foreign cities or countries, to make going from one place to another more convenient. Face recognition technology can help to minimize or straight up eliminate time spent with paperwork through biometric screening of individuals.

Cruise Lines

In addition to quicker embarkation and disembarkation, a great benefit that can be provided on cruise ships using face recognition is that customer purchases and services can be linked to a face scan. 

This means that you can have a cashless experience, never having to take out or even carry your wallet, and approve purchases via a facial scan, and have them charged directly to your account.

Travel Agencies and Tour Operators

Using face recognition for travel agencies can help you to identify returning customers, and offer them personalized travel plans and ideas based on their past trips and preferences. This highly increases the likelihood that your travel or holiday plan is something you will thoroughly enjoy.

Public Transport

When in a foreign city, you would of course be utilizing a lot of the public transport infrastructure. In cities that are known tourist spots, facial recognition can help to manage the greater-than-normal load certain to be formed through swifter, ticketless travel where your face would act as your ticket or pass.

In places like railway stations, facial recognition also enhances security greatly, something that becomes more difficult with traditional methods like guards in places where large crowds are certain to form.

A Few Challenges

Even with all the different ways that this tech can enhance travel experiences, adoption is still relatively slower than it can be. There are a few reasons for this:

Data Privacy

Facial recognition systems by their nature collect much more personal data than other systems. This creates the concern of data privacy and security in travel, as it is more or less impossible to ensure that every single establishment’s implementation of biometric authentication is secure enough to trust with your data.

Accuracy

Different providers have different levels of accuracy in the recognition and identification capabilities of their software. So, while the tech is improving each day, there can be issues in using face recognition for tourist destinations, especially as there would likely be a higher concentration of diverse ethnicities, something facial recognition currently struggles to deal with.

Frictionless Customer Verification with Facia

To be used in an establishment that will see customers coming from different cities and countries, a facial recognition solution needs to be frictionless and easy to use. The solutions provided by Facia can perform detection in less than a second, meaning there is little to no chance of anything going wrong, no matter what the customer’s level of experience with the system is.