The travel industry has experienced a major transformation, moving from traditional physical setups to a thriving online presence. This shift has brought numerous benefits to travel businesses, enabling them to provide improved services and easily attract travelers from all around the world. Remote booking, onboarding, and check-in processes have become seamless and convenient.
Despite these positive changes, it is crucial to be aware of potential risks. Recent statistics reveal a troubling surge in fraudulent activities, posing a threat not only to travel businesses but also to their customers.
According to Sift, there is about a 400% increase year-over-year in 2022. It feels quite essential to protect your business against fraud, doesn’t it? It is imperative to take measures to safeguard your business against such incidents, especially during remote onboarding.
To ensure safety and prevent fraud, identity verification is essential. Businesses must dedicate time to guest screening or background checks before customers can access their services.
If you’re unsure about the implications of identity verification for your business and how to get it done, don’t worry. We’ve got you covered. In this blog, we’ll explain what identity verification means in the travel industry and how it works. We’ll also provide you with solutions to make the verification process easier for you and your customers.
Are you ready to learn everything about identity verification in the travel industry? Let’s get started!
How Does Identity Verification Work in the Travel Industry?
Identity verification procedures in travel are typically carried out when booking tickets, checking in, or during onboarding. We list a few examples below:
- Booking tickets: When booking train or flight tickets, users must provide personal information such as their name, date of birth, and ID number to confirm their identity. Once this information is provided, users can proceed to book their desired ticket.
- Check-in: Upon arrival at a hotel, guests are asked to present identity documents such as an ID card or passport. This is done to ensure that the individual who made the booking is the same one present at the establishment. Additionally, verifying the age of guests is required to ensure they are of legal age to travel alone and consume alcohol.
- Driver onboarding: When travelers want to rent a car, car rental companies must verify two pieces of documentation when they register drivers: the driver’s ID and their driving license. This verification is necessary to ensure the safety of both the business and the driver, as well as other drivers on the road.
How Do You Verify the Identity of Your Travelers?
Do you know your customers? Do you have all the information needed from them? Ensuring the identity of travelers is a crucial process in the travel industry. Companies must verify travelers’ identity before accessing any services, which can be done during onboarding or check-in. Let’s discover the different ways you can identify your travelers’ identities.
Manual ID verification
Processing ID documents manually to verify customers’ identities involves several steps.
Initially, customers need to submit their identity documents. This can be done physically, for example at a hotel’s front desk, or digitally by uploading a picture of their IDs. Subsequently, one of your staff members needs to check the data on them, such as name, nationality, expiry date, and passport number. Then, these details are manually entered into a form or program, and a double-check is performed to ensure accuracy and avoid mistakes.
This manual process is manageable when there are only a few guests arriving one after another. However, it becomes overwhelming if multiple guests arrive at the same time. Handling such a situation manually can pose a significant challenge. Entering all the details takes time, and errors may occur, leading to potential issues.
Additionally, verifying the authenticity of the documents needs to be done. As fraudsters become increasingly sophisticated, it makes it harder for the human eye to detect fraudulent documents.
Automated ID verification
Automated ID verification is the process of using software to verify a person’s identity. It allows you to automatically verify ID documents, and detect fraud. This automated process can highly contribute to the success of your business.
An example of an automated ID verification process is given below:
- With automated ID document verification, customers easily provide their identity documents through email or upload. Once the documents are submitted, the software takes over the process. It automatically extracts all the relevant data from the documents, using OCR technology. Moreover, the system can swiftly identify fraudulent documents, significantly reducing the verification time to a matter of seconds. This streamlined and secure approach revolutionizes the way businesses handle identity verification.
- As a second layer of security, users can be required to perform specific movements to ensure their physical presence. It’s called liveness detection and it is a type of biometric verification. Customers are prompted to nod or move their heads, for instance. By requesting random actions, this process becomes unpredictable, making it difficult for fraudsters to anticipate and manipulate. As a result, the risk of fraud is significantly reduced with the implementation of liveness detection in the identity verification process.
- Lastly, it’s possible to verify a person’s identity through selfie verification. This requires customers to take and send a selfie using their smartphone. The selfie is then analyzed and compared with the previously submitted ID document during the document verification. It reduces the risk of the usage of stolen identity documents.
Overall the automated verification process can be completed in just a few minutes!
Now, if you’re thinking of using ID verification software, here’s a thing to keep in mind: different document types may be required to verify depending on a traveler’s origin and the business sector or location you’re in. These documents may include ID cards, passports, or driver’s licenses, each with various versions. It’s essential to have an ID verification system that has global coverage with all of these documents to ensure the ability to authenticate and identify all travelers.
Why Should You Use Digital ID Verification?
As we’ve seen, manual identity verification can be a long and tedious process. The travel industry is always seeking to enhance customer experiences, just like other industries. With the help of digital scanning of ID documents, businesses can let their customers now safely book anything online in ways that were not possible before. Here are a few positive outcomes you can expect from it:
- Decrease the waiting time for your guests: With smart ID verification, you can decrease your onboarding time by 70%. You no longer have to worry about your guests waiting for long periods of time. Within seconds, the software will verify the identity of your guests.
- Comply with regulations: Using software will allow you to comply easily with regulations. For GDPR purposes, for example, you need to safeguard the personal information of your customers. With smart ID verification software, you can anonymize data of your customers, by masking a part of the information.
- Only legit travelers can access your services: By utilizing intelligent software, it becomes simpler to identify and prevent fraudulent activities. Techniques such as EXIF analysis can detect manipulated documents automatically while biometric verification can detect a spoofing attack. Therefore, you ensure that the individuals accessing your services are who they claim to be.
- Avoid 99% of human errors in administration: Entering data manually can result in errors that may end up costing your company money and causing frustration for your customers. Smart ID verification can help prevent these errors, ensuring up to 99% accuracy with the option for a human-in-the-loop.
- Improve customer experience: By reducing waiting times and minimizing errors made by travelers or your team, the user experience is significantly improved. Customers will no longer be frustrated, and your employees will no longer be overwhelmed.
- Reduce costs: Intelligent software automation can help reduce costs in two areas. Firstly, detecting fraud automatically can save the company a lot of money. Secondly, it can significantly reduce the amount of time employees spend manually processing documents, which also cuts down on associated costs.
- Fewer documents needed: By using biometric verification, there’s no need to ask your guests to provide you with extra documentation as the software can simply compare their facial features with the picture on the ID document.
Automate Your Identity Verification Process with Klippa
We talked about the use of identity verification solutions in the travel industry. An example of such a solution is Klippa’s AI-powered travel ID verification solution. Our solution can automatically process ID documents from more than 150 countries by capturing, organizing, extracting, anonymizing, and verifying the data using AI technologies.
Our solution can significantly accelerate your ID document processing within your business. It comes with advanced features like liveness detection and selfie verification to help against fraud.
Additionally, the anonymization of sensitive information helps you to comply with GDPR. But wait, there is more! Our software has various modules that can work together or separately, providing you with the following functionalities:
- Accurately verify the authenticity of your documents
- Use AI algorithms to detect document fraud
- Selfie checks by comparing facial biometrics with the picture on an ID document
- Eliminate the risk of identity spoofing through liveness checks
- Use data anonymization to add an extra layer of security and be GDPR compliant
- Achieve 100% accuracy with NFC checks by reading encrypted data of ID documents
- Easy to integrate into existing software through API or SDK
Interested to know more about our product and optimize your identity verification processes? Please feel free to contact us, or ask for a free demo below. Our team will be happy to help you.