Hoping to bring back business travel and convince a skeptical flying public to get back in the air, airlines are looking to create their own version of a ‘travel bubble’ with flights and routes that will avoid quarantine restrictions.
Despite an uptick in COVID-19 in more than 35 states, airlines believe the availability of more rapid testing as well their health and safety protocols – and recent reports that flying is safe – will prompt an increase in tickets.
“In terms of returning to something that even looks remotely like a pre-pandemic travel level, we’re going to need to have, in the short and medium-term, a rapid-testing strategy that balances the public health considerations [and] economic recovery,” JetBlue president Joanna Geraghty said in a recent earnings call. “[That] allows countries and states to reopen or relax and eliminate what we see is largely ineffective quarantines and other travel restrictions.”
One big hurdle toward the eventual elimination or easing of border restrictions and quarantine requirements happened earlier this month with the first transatlantic trial of CommonPass, a digital health pass app, on a United flight from London to Newark. Earlier in October, CommonPass also was tested on a Cathay Pacific flight from Hong Kong to Singapore.
CommonPass was implemented successfully, and American Express Global Business Travel (GBT) announced it is working with officials to establish an air bridge between the same two destinations.
“The issue behind travel is the paralysis caused by the quarantines and border closures,” Drew Crawley, chief commercial officer of GBT told TravelPulse earlier this week. “Travelers need to be confident to get back in the air, and that is something that we need to fix to give travelers confidence to travel safely.”
“We believe the CommonPass framework allows governments to implement much more nuanced policies if they can count on laboratory results and vaccination records from other countries,” Brad Perkins, co-founder and chief medical officer of the Commons Project Foundation, said in a call to media after the Newark test. “They can avoid closing the border or having mandatory quarantines in place for all arrivals.”
In addition, the platform provides an extra level of data security, Commons Project Foundation CEO Paul Meyer said, as they do not have to hand over testing paperwork to airline or border officials.
“It verifies that a traveler has been tested, but it’s not stored or conveyed to an airline or government,” Meyer said. “It complies with [General Data Protection Regulation] and the other data privacy requirements.”
CommonPass in the next two months will roll out to other locations with broader deployment planned for 2021, Meyer said.
