ACI EUROPE, Amadeus, IATA, IDEMIA Public Security and SITA have formed a new coalition urging the EU to ensure its Digital Omnibus does not inadvertently restrict the voluntary biometric systems airports and airlines are developing to handle rapidly growing passenger volumes.
Geneva, Switzerland (Tourism Reporter) — Five of the most powerful names in global air travel have joined forces around a single, narrow but consequential demand: don’t let Brussels’ attempt to simplify digital regulation inadvertently undermine the biometric systems that are quietly reshaping how passengers move through airports.
ACI EUROPE, Amadeus, IATA, IDEMIA Public Security and SITA announced on 1 October the formation of the Responsible Biometrics Travel Industry Coalition, a new industry body created to influence how the European Union’s Digital Omnibus treats the voluntary use of facial recognition, fingerprint verification and other biometric identity technologies in travel.
The coalition is not calling for an exemption from EU oversight. Quite the opposite. Its argument is that Europe can maintain strong privacy and data-protection safeguards while still allowing passengers who choose to use biometric technology to benefit from faster, more seamless journeys. The concern is that legislation intended to simplify Europe’s digital rulebook could inadvertently place restrictions on one of aviation’s most significant modernisation efforts.
For an industry that has spent years developing biometric-enabled journeys, from automated identity verification to smoother passenger processing, the timing of the intervention is deliberate.
The Digital Omnibus is now moving through the EU legislative process. The coalition wants its concerns addressed before the rules are finalised — not after.
And there is a much bigger issue behind the regulatory argument.
ICAO forecasts that global air passenger traffic could reach 12.4 billion passengers annually by 2050 — nearly three times 2024 levels. The coalition argues that biometric and digital identity technologies could help airports process that growth more efficiently, make better use of existing infrastructure and reduce pressure on physical airport capacity.
In other words, this is not simply a technology story. It is a capacity story — and ultimately, a tourism story.
A simplification package that could complicate the one thing it was meant to ease
The Digital Omnibus was never conceived as an aviation policy. Presented by the European Commission in November 2025, the package is designed to simplify Europe’s digital rulebook, including targeted changes to the GDPR alongside measures covering artificial intelligence, cybersecurity and data. Its stated objectives are to reduce administrative and compliance burdens, clarify overlapping rules and support European innovation and competitiveness.
Within that broader simplification effort, however, are changes relevant to Article 9 of the GDPR, which governs “special category” personal data, including biometric data used to uniquely identify an individual. Under the current GDPR framework, such data receives heightened protection and its processing is generally prohibited unless specific conditions apply.
The issue for the travel industry is what those rules could mean in practice for passengers who voluntarily choose to use biometric systems.
The coalition argues that the Digital Omnibus, despite being designed to simplify Europe’s digital framework, could inadvertently place restrictions on the voluntary use of biometrics in travel. Its position is that the EU can maintain strong privacy and cybersecurity protections while still allowing passengers to choose biometric journeys where appropriate safeguards are in place.
That distinction between regulatory intent and practical effect sits at the centre of the coalition’s message.
The Digital Omnibus is intended to simplify Europe’s digital rulebook while maintaining high standards of data protection and cybersecurity. But, the coalition warns, the legislation could unintentionally restrict a technology that airports and airlines increasingly see as part of the answer to growing passenger volumes.
It is not an argument against regulation. It is an argument for regulatory precision.
And that may be the more interesting story for tourism.
Europe is preparing for a future in which passenger volumes continue to grow, while airport infrastructure remains constrained. The coalition believes biometrics can help airports process more passengers through existing infrastructure, improve passenger flow and reduce repeated manual document checks.
The question, then, is whether Europe can simplify the rules without making the journey itself more complicated.
What the coalition actually wants from Brussels
The ask is specific rather than sweeping. The coalition is calling for the Digital Omnibus to adopt technology-neutral rules that allow the voluntary use of biometric data where appropriate safeguards are in place, while ensuring passengers always retain a non-biometric alternative. In practical terms, that means nobody should be required to use facial recognition or another biometric system as a condition of travel. But passengers who choose to use it should not find that option unintentionally restricted by rules designed for a broader digital-policy context.
Passenger choice runs through the coalition’s entire position.
Travellers should be able to decide whether to share their biometric data and should retain the ability to request its deletion. The coalition says biometric solutions should be “voluntary, secure and limited to a defined journey”, rather than becoming an open-ended system of identity tracking.
The coalition is also making the case that this is not simply an industry solution looking for a problem. It points to research from IATA’s Global Passenger Survey, which found that 74% of travellers surveyed were willing to share biometric data instead of showing a passport or boarding pass.
That figure gives the industry an important piece of evidence: there appears to be substantial passenger willingness to exchange traditional document checks for biometric verification when the choice is available.
But the coalition’s position is equally clear on the condition attached to that willingness: the technology should make the journey easier without making the passenger surrender control over how their identity data is used.
That is what makes the Brussels debate more interesting than a simple argument over facial recognition.
The industry is asking Europe to regulate the technology without regulating away the choice to use it.
Five organisations, one shared commercial and operational interest
The coalition’s membership is itself a signal of how central biometrics has become to several critical layers of the aviation value chain.
ACI EUROPE represents the airports that must physically process growing passenger volumes. Amadeus and SITA provide technology and data infrastructure used across the passenger journey, while IDEMIA Public Security brings decades of government-grade biometric experience, with biometric-based solutions serving 600 government, state and federal agencies. IATA brings the airlines into the coalition, representing more than 370 carriers that account for around 85% of global air traffic.
Put those organisations around the same table and the commercial and operational logic becomes easier to see.
Airports need to move more passengers. Airlines need journeys to become more efficient. Technology companies need the regulatory certainty to scale. And biometric specialists need a framework in which those systems can actually be deployed.
The coalition’s senior representatives are Olivier Jankovec, Director General of ACI EUROPE; Fernando Cuesta, Senior Vice President, Industry Affairs Global Development at Amadeus; Thomas Reynaert, Senior Vice President, External Affairs at IATA; Lisa Shoemaker, Senior Vice President, Corporate Relations at IDEMIA Public Security; and Pedro Alves, Senior Vice President, Borders at SITA.
Together, they have published the “Advancing Responsible Biometrics in Europe” manifesto, which sets out what the coalition describes as a balanced, evidence-based approach to biometric technology in travel.
Its argument is deliberately two-sided: Europe can maintain strong privacy and fundamental-rights protections while creating regulatory clarity that allows responsible biometric systems to develop.
“Biometric journeys should always be based on passenger choice and voluntary participation.”
The coalition says its manifesto is intended to establish industry commitments around responsible biometric use while calling for rules that facilitate a secure and seamless future for more than one billion European air travellers each year. It also explicitly links the issue to growing passenger volumes, limited airport capacity and the competitiveness of Europe’s transport and tourism sectors.
That last point matters.
The coalition is not simply asking Brussels to make biometrics easier. It is arguing that biometric regulation could become part of Europe’s future tourism and transport capacity strategy.
And that takes the debate beyond facial recognition.
It becomes a question of how Europe intends to move billions more people through its airports without building every solution in concrete and steel.
Why the industry is racing the clock on passenger volumes
The coalition’s argument is not purely about data-protection philosophy. It is substantially about capacity.
The group cites International Civil Aviation Organization forecasting that global air passenger traffic will reach 12.4 billion passengers annually by 2050 — nearly three times 2024 levels. European airports will have to absorb that growth while making increasingly efficient use of existing infrastructure.
Biometric verification, the coalition argues, can help address that capacity challenge. By reducing repeated manual document checks at different points of the passenger journey, biometric systems can increase throughput, improve passenger flows and help airports make better use of existing terminal infrastructure. They can also help airports manage peak periods and allow staff to focus more attention on passengers who need assistance or additional attention.
The commercial logic extends beyond passenger processing.
Regulatory clarity is also an investment question.
The coalition argues that a clear regulatory framework can encourage continued investment and give European technology companies greater confidence to develop and scale biometric solutions in their home market. In its view, uncertainty around the rules risks slowing deployment of technologies that could contribute to the competitiveness of Europe’s transport and tourism sectors.
That competitiveness argument matters because the Digital Omnibus sits within a much broader European effort to simplify digital regulation, support innovation and strengthen competitiveness. The coalition is effectively asking Brussels to ensure that the same regulatory simplification does not unintentionally create new friction around biometric travel.
And this is where the issue becomes particularly relevant to tourism.
More passengers do not automatically mean more tourism capacity. If airports cannot move those passengers efficiently, growth eventually encounters a physical and operational bottleneck.
The coalition’s argument is that digital identity and biometrics could help Europe stretch the capacity of the infrastructure it already has — rather than relying entirely on more terminals, more gates and more physical processing points.
For Tourism Reporter, that is the bigger story behind the Brussels debate:
The future of tourism growth may depend not only on how many people want to travel, but on how efficiently destinations can move them once they do.
The traveller stake hiding inside a regulatory story
For passengers, the coalition’s intervention touches something far more tangible than most GDPR debates ever reach: how long the queue is, and how many times a traveller has to prove who they are during a single journey.
Biometric systems are designed to address precisely that friction. Instead of repeatedly presenting a passport or boarding pass at different points in the airport, passengers who opt in can use a digital identity to support a more seamless journey through processes such as check-in, bag drop, security and boarding. The industry argues that this can improve passenger flow, reduce friction and make better use of existing airport infrastructure.
What the coalition is defending, in essence, is the continued ability to make that choice at scale.
Nobody within the coalition is calling for biometric processing to become mandatory. Its manifesto explicitly calls for voluntary participation and says passengers should retain a non-biometric alternative. The argument is therefore not that every traveller should become biometric-enabled. It is that travellers who want a faster, more seamless digital journey should be able to choose it, provided appropriate privacy and security safeguards are in place.
That distinction matters.
The industry is not asking Brussels to make biometrics compulsory. It is asking Brussels not to make voluntary biometrics unnecessarily difficult.
For airlines and airports, the stakes extend beyond the individual checkpoint. As passenger numbers grow, the ability to process more people through existing infrastructure becomes increasingly important. If biometric systems can help reduce repeated identity checks and improve passenger flow, restrictions on their deployment could affect how quickly that transformation develops.
For the wider travel trade, that makes the regulatory outcome relevant far beyond airport technology. Airlines can use smoother processing as part of the passenger experience. Airports can position efficient journeys as part of their competitiveness. And destinations ultimately benefit when the infrastructure connecting travellers to them works with less friction.
The biometric debate may be taking place inside Europe’s data-protection rulebook. But the experience it is ultimately shaping happens at the airport — in the queue, at the gate and on the journey in between.
A narrow fight with a wide shadow
What makes this coalition notable is less its existence than its composition. Airports, technology companies and airlines do not always arrive at the same regulatory table with identical priorities. Here, however, those parts of the travel ecosystem — alongside a specialist in biometric identity and credentialing — are speaking with one voice on a single legislative proposal.
That alignment is significant because the same regulatory question is being viewed from several different points in the passenger journey.
The coalition is careful to frame its position as collaborative rather than adversarial, repeatedly stressing the importance of continued dialogue between industry and public authorities. Its stated objective is to preserve Europe’s high standards for privacy, security and data protection while ensuring that voluntary biometric travel can continue to develop.
Whether that argument ultimately influences the legislation remains an open question. The Digital Omnibus is still a proposal, not law, and its passage through the European Parliament and Council can involve amendments and further negotiations. The coalition has therefore entered the debate at a point when the final regulatory framework is not yet settled.
What is already clear is that Europe’s aviation and travel-technology sectors consider the issue significant enough to establish a formal, named coalition rather than pursue the matter solely through separate organisational channels.
And that reveals where the real battleground lies.
It is no longer simply whether biometrics have a place in European travel. It is how precisely Brussels defines the rules under which passengers can choose to use them.
That distinction matters because the technology is becoming part of a much larger conversation about the future capacity of European travel.
If global passenger volumes continue to rise towards the levels forecast for 2050, airports will need to find ways to process more people through infrastructure that cannot expand indefinitely. The coalition believes voluntary biometric journeys can form part of that solution.
For Tourism Reporter, that is the bigger story behind the Brussels debate: the future of tourism capacity is increasingly being shaped not only by runways, terminals and aircraft, but by the digital rules governing how people move through them.
The fight may be narrow. The question it raises is much bigger: how will Europe move the next generation of travellers?
This report is part of Tourism Reporter’s tourism intelligence coverage, examining how IATA and industry leaders are responding to the technology, regulatory and infrastructure challenges of moving a rapidly growing global travelling public.
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