The current legal tussle between the state of Florida and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control may have caught your eye.
Florida has new law that says businesses may not require proof of a vaccination to deliver services. The CDC requires cruise ships to be able to demonstrate that 95% of passengers and 98% of crew members are vaccinated. This kerfuffle is an exercise in political kabuki theater, and will ultimately get a political resolution, most likely a carve-out from the law for cruise lines. Of course, cruise lines and the secondary vendors they support are huge employers and a crucial part of the economy in Florida.
You have also been hearing about “vaccine passports,” smartphone applications to prove one’s vaccination status quickly and securely. As in Florida, this issue has become polarized and politicized in the U.S., but in the rest of the world, the idea has taken root. The core concept is a digital application on your smartphone that can be read in an instant and is secure from tampering by design. Examples relevant to travel include the IATA Travel Pass or the CommonPass, among many other concepts.
The way these applications work varies, but the most interesting ones for hoteliers revolve around Self-Sovereign Identity, or SSI. SSI concepts are also often referred to Decentralized ID. The name tells you the most important thing: It is about the self being sovereign over one’s own identity, where the identity holder controls what information is released to whom and when. So for international travel, the immigration officers of the countries you are visiting and the hotels you are staying in all have a vested interest in documenting your vaccination status before you get on your flight. You, the traveler, are motivated to provide this information, or you cannot board or cross the border. And you want to do it quickly — with 250 people in line behind you — and you want it to be tamper-proof, because what if the person sitting right next to you for the next nine hours has a phony credential and is not really vaccinated? Do you really want to test your vaccination?
But the potential benefits for travelers and travel suppliers, such as hotels, goes far beyond just documentation of vaccination status. Think about your profile: In addition to your name and address information, it can store your loyalty program memberships, seating preferences for airlines, room preferences for hotels, and food preferences and restrictions, but only for those you wish to share them with. And think about multiple profiles: one for business travel, one for family travel and one for the annual golf adventure with your friends. Payment methods can be securely attached, as well.
So one can see some obvious benefits for hotel companies: foolproof identification of loyalty program members, with certainty that the member’s preferences are current and accurate; a secure and documented contactless check-in process becomes possible with a wave of a mobile phone; and more. Think a little more, and there are opportunities to reduce privacy and PCI compliance costs and risks, reduce the power of intermediaries in the room distribution value chain and simplify the trip for the traveler by stitching everything about it together for her in one place.
SSI-based applications do this with an assortment of technologies. One set, decentralized identifiers, will live on a blockchain, encrypted, distributed and verified. Other technologies, not necessarily on the blockchain, will capture and store attestations about the ID — proof that he really did stay 47 room nights with the other brand last year and maybe you should grant a status match — and facilitate resolved requests for data and permissions to deliver the data seamlessly.
SSI applications are intended to be an open network, with standards-based inter-operability between smartphone apps, blockchains and other components from any vendor that complies with the open standards. Major players in this space include Microsoft, IBM, Accenture, RSA, and more household names, plus an astonishing array of smaller firms from all over the world.
Much of the work around Self-Sovereign Identity is being orchestrated by the Decentralized Identity Foundation, a non-profit devoted to ensuring open standards and inter-operability by design. Standards bodies like DIF rely on their members to get the work done, often organized by their industries, with common interests. DIF today houses special interest groups for banking and finance, healthcare and of course, hospitality and travel. The members of the hospitality and travel special interest group are working to ensure that as development of SSI tools and technologies continue, the needs of the travel industry will be met. All are welcome to participate in this effort that will change your travel experiences for the better!
Mark Haley is a Partner at Prism Hospitality Consulting, a boutique firm servicing the global hospitality industry at the intersection of hospitality technology and marketing. For more information, please visit https://prismhospitalityconsulting.com.
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