Twenty-twenty saw COVID-conscious travel procedures and the emergence of touchless tech define the landscape of business travel. Corporate Traveller’s GM, Oz Desai, weighs in on how the insecurities surrounding data security impact business travel and what steps business travellers can take to keep their data safe while travelling. New ‘tech’ has emerged offering possible solutions for an industry furiously navigating the challenges of operating during a global pandemic. Technological innovations such as biometrics, facial recognition, and smart products all made air travel and border crossings safer and more efficient, while speeding up the return to ‘normal’ travel during the pandemic. By 2023, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security expects to be using facial recognition on 97% of travellers. While in countries like Belize, travellers must download contact-tracing apps, and in Hong Kong and Grenada they are required wear a GPS tracker during the pandemic. These trends, which are set to rapidly become global norms, can feel ‘invasive’ to privacy-conscious travellers. Amnesty International also drew attention to the dangers of these new technologies when it called out Bahrain, Kuwait, and Norway last year for overly invasive apps, and Qatar for a security flaw that made personal information vulnerable to hackers. However, while facial recognition during your travels might feel invasive, the risks are relatively limited. Traveller data is mostly used to model and predict travel demand, timing and pricing tolerance. According to data specialists quoted in National Geographic, if you have no issues with posting selfies on social media, your anxiety over travel innovations might just…
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