More than 100 countries now issue eVisas, but IATA says the systems airlines use to verify them remain fragmented — creating a costly gap between governments approving digital travel authorisations and carriers being able to confirm them in seconds at check-in.
Global (Tourism Reporter) — For destinations seeking to make international travel easier, the electronic visa has been one of the more tangible successes of travel facilitation. What once required an embassy appointment, physical paperwork, a passport stamp and days or weeks of waiting can, in many markets, now be handled online — with an application submitted, a fee paid and an approval issued digitally before the journey begins.
That transformation has made visa processing more accessible and convenient for travellers, while helping governments modernise an important part of the border process. More than 100 countries now issue eVisas, according to the International Air Transport Association (IATA).
But there is a less visible side to that digital transformation — and it begins after the visa has been issued.
In a new IATA opinion, Harry Grewal, the association’s Director of Airports, Infrastructure & Customer Experience, argues that the industry has made considerable progress in digitising visa applications and approvals, while leaving airlines with a much less standardised problem: how to verify, quickly and reliably at check-in, that a passenger’s digital travel authorisation is genuine and valid.
The distinction matters.
For the traveller, the eVisa may look like the end of the process. For the airline, it can be the beginning of a verification challenge.
And that is the blind spot IATA wants governments, airlines and tourism stakeholders to address.
A Problem Hiding in Plain Sight at the Check-In Desk
Writing for the IATA Opinions Blog, Harry Grewal, IATA’s Director of Airports, Infrastructure & Customer Experience, poses a deceptively simple question that most travellers — and perhaps even some tourism marketers — rarely consider: when a passenger arrives at check-in with a valid passport, a confirmed ticket and an eVisa, how does the airline actually know that the eVisa is genuine and valid?
For airlines, that question carries considerably more weight than it might appear to the traveller. Carriers are responsible for checking that passengers have the documentation required for international travel before allowing them to board, and an incorrect decision can carry a significant financial consequence. Grewal cites average fines and removal costs of around US$9,000 per passenger when an airline transports someone who is subsequently found not to have the required entry documents.
That makes visa verification more than an administrative detail.
It is a financial and operational risk sitting directly at the check-in desk — one that can influence how confidently an airline processes a passenger and, ultimately, how frictionless a destination’s carefully designed eVisa journey feels in practice.
The problem, as Grewal sets out, is that the convenience created by digital visa issuance has not been matched by an equally standardised system for digital verification.
An eVisa confirmation might arrive by email, PDF or QR code. Verification might require an airline agent to visit a government website, consult a national database or examine supporting documentation manually. In other cases, the process may depend on systems that are not directly integrated with the airline’s check-in environment.
And with more than 100 countries now issuing eVisas, each with its own approach to confirmation and verification, the complexity becomes much harder to ignore.
For an airline employee handling passengers travelling to destinations around the world — sometimes with connecting journeys involving several different countries and documentation requirements — there is no universal verification experience.
The traveller sees one digital visa. The airline sees a potentially different verification process for every destination.
That is the mismatch at the heart of Grewal’s argument.
As he puts it, “While travelers benefit from the simplicity of eVisa issuance, airlines suffer from the complexity of verification.”
The digital visa may have solved the question of how a government issues travel authorisation.
The harder question is increasingly how the rest of the travel ecosystem can verify it quickly, consistently and with enough certainty to allow the passenger to board.
And that is where the next phase of travel-document digitalisation may need to begin.
Why Tourism Boards Should Care About an Airline Back-Office Problem
It would be easy for destination marketing organisations to dismiss this as an airline operational problem — a back-office complication with little connection to the business of attracting visitors.
That would miss the larger tourism implication.
A traveller who is denied boarding because an airline cannot verify a legitimate eVisa does not simply experience an inconvenience at the airport. For the destination, that passenger may represent a hotel booking that never materialises, a tour that goes unused, a restaurant reservation that is cancelled and an attraction ticket that is never redeemed.
More importantly, the failure occurs at precisely the point when the destination’s promise of frictionless access is supposed to become reality.
A country may spend millions promoting its easy online visa application, simplifying the visitor journey and persuading travellers that entering the destination is straightforward. But if that journey breaks down at check-in because the airline cannot confidently verify the authorisation, the destination’s digital convenience advantage can disappear in a matter of minutes.
And the reputational consequences can travel further than the individual booking.
Travellers increasingly share airport experiences in real time, meaning a difficult check-in or denied boarding experience can become part of the destination’s reputation long after the advertising campaign that prompted the original trip has been forgotten.
For tourism authorities, therefore, the eVisa journey does not end when the government sends the approval email.
It ends when the airline can recognise that approval, trust it and allow the passenger to board.
There is also a quieter structural issue in Grewal’s argument.
Airlines operating in an environment where visa verification is inconsistent have a strong incentive to manage their risk conservatively. The cost of mistakenly boarding a passenger without valid documentation can include fines and removal expenses. By contrast, refusing to board a passenger whose legitimate digital authorisation cannot be verified may still create an unhappy customer and a lost booking, but the immediate regulatory exposure for the airline is very different.
That creates an imbalance.
The airline carries the operational risk, while the destination can absorb the lost visitor.
For tourism policymakers, that distinction matters because destinations increasingly compete on the ease of travel as much as on the attractions themselves. Two countries may offer similarly attractive beaches, cities, resorts or cultural experiences, and both may advertise a convenient eVisa system. But if an airline can verify one country’s authorisation instantly and must investigate the other’s manually, the difference may influence the journey before the traveller ever reaches the immigration desk.
The advantage, in other words, may not belong to the country with the most sophisticated visa application portal.
It may belong to the country whose digital travel authorisation is easiest for the airline to trust.
That makes visa verification a tourism issue — even if most of the infrastructure sits somewhere behind the scenes.
The traveller sees an eVisa. The airline sees a verification system. Tourism boards need to understand both.
The Fix Already Exists — It Just Isn’t Widely Deployed
Harry Grewal’s argument is notable for one reason: the industry is no longer debating whether a solution exists. It is debating why that solution has not become the global standard.
Rather than proposing an entirely new system, IATA argues that the aviation and border-management sectors already have the building blocks needed to make digital visa verification as seamless as digital visa issuance. The challenge is adoption.
At the centre of that solution are two complementary technologies developed through collaboration between IATA, governments and the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO).
The first is Interactive Advance Passenger Information (iAPI).
Unlike a manual document check, iAPI allows an airline to transmit a passenger’s travel information electronically to the destination government during check-in and receive a real-time response confirming whether the traveller meets entry requirements. Instead of asking a check-in agent to interpret emails, PDFs or QR codes, the airline receives an authoritative confirmation directly from the destination’s border system.
In effect, verification becomes a live conversation between the airline and the destination government, rather than a judgement call made at the airport counter.
The operational difference is significant.
According to Grewal, airlines report documentation compliance rates up to 20 times higher in countries operating comprehensive iAPI systems than in destinations where visa verification still relies largely on manual checks and fragmented processes.
For destinations promoting eVisas as part of their tourism competitiveness strategy, that statistic carries an important implication: the easier it is for airlines to verify an authorisation, the easier it is for legitimate visitors to board their flights.
The problem is scale.
Fewer than 30 countries currently operate iAPI systems, meaning the overwhelming majority of countries issuing eVisas still rely on less integrated verification methods.
The second piece of the solution addresses a different weakness.
The ICAO Digital Travel Authorization (DTA) is designed to create a standardised, digitally signed proof of travel authorisation that airlines can authenticate regardless of which country issued it. Instead of every government producing its own confirmation format, the DTA establishes a more consistent digital credential that can be recognised across the aviation ecosystem.
Together, the two technologies solve different parts of the same problem.
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iAPI provides real-time government confirmation during check-in where the infrastructure exists.
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DTA provides a trusted, standardised digital proof of authorisation where real-time verification is not yet available.
Used together, they create a verification pathway that is considerably more reliable than today’s patchwork of emails, PDFs, QR codes and country-specific websites.
That is why IATA argues the industry’s next priority is no longer digitising visas.
It is digitising trust.
The aviation industry has largely solved how governments issue electronic travel authorisations. The next phase is ensuring those authorisations can be verified instantly, consistently and securely across airlines, airports and border authorities worldwide.
For tourism destinations, that distinction is more than technical.
A digital visa only delivers its full promise when the traveller’s journey remains digital from approval to boarding gate.
What This Means for Tourism Professionals Right Now
Grewal is careful to make an important distinction: better digital visa verification does not mean governments surrender control over immigration policy. Countries remain free to determine who requires a visa, what conditions apply and who is ultimately permitted to enter.
The change is in how those decisions are communicated and verified.
Governments have made substantial progress in digitising visa applications and approvals. The gap, Grewal argues, is that the verification stage — the moment when an airline must establish that the digital authorisation is genuine and valid — has not advanced at the same pace.
That suggests a change in how new eVisa programmes should be designed.
Airlines need to be part of the process from the beginning, rather than brought in after the application portal has already gone live.
For tourism ministries, destination marketing organisations and other industry stakeholders, that is perhaps the most practical lesson in the entire debate.
When a country presents an eVisa as a visitor-facilitation measure, the question should not stop at “How easy is it for a traveller to apply?”
It should also be:
“How easily can the airline verify it?”
That is the question tourism authorities should be taking into their discussions with immigration agencies, border authorities and aviation partners when developing or upgrading digital travel authorisation systems.
Because the tourism value of an eVisa does not exist solely on the government website.
Its value is realised at the point where a traveller presents a passport at an airline check-in desk and expects to hear: “You’re cleared to board.”
A destination that has invested in iAPI connectivity or DTA-compliant digital authorisation is therefore addressing a much deeper part of the visitor journey than one that has simply replaced a paper application with an online form.
And that distinction could become increasingly important as more countries compete to make international travel easier.
The next generation of eVisa competitiveness may not be determined by who has the slickest application portal. It may be determined by who has built the most trusted connection between the government that issues the authorisation and the airline that has to verify it.
For tourism professionals, that is the blind spot worth keeping firmly on the agenda.
This report draws on an opinion piece by Harry Grewal, IATA Director, Airports, Infrastructure & Customer Experience, published on the IATA Pressroom Opinions Blog on 16 September 2026, and its discussion of IATA’s Control Authorities Working Group publication, “Non-Physical Authorizations to Travel: Best Practices for Issuers and Verifiers (2026).”
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