Identity management in Tourism in the Future.

Let's use the scenario of air travel.

The numerator is convenience and the denominator is the security.

Whatever advances are being proposed and obtained are to increase the convenience of the travelers and the people enabling the travel while maintaining the high level of security of the borders and the people with those borders.

How did you use your identity document when you travel earlier around the 1980s?
After the first industrial revolution and the advent of aircraft, only a few rich and wealthy people with great status could afford air travel, the who's and who would no need to prove their identity and would get a smooth passage but then many people started to get rich and were able to afford the air travel and the focus completely shifted from sea travel to air travel for international trade and tourism.
In the 1980s, to travel domestically we hardly used any document, we were not asked to produce any identity document to book an air ticket and check-in and just in case if we were, we produced any government-issued document. Some countries had national ID cards but for most others driving license was acceptable as at that time it was one of the most portable standard government-issued documents that existed.

For international travel, the main identity document was the passport, which took a long time to issue and was also handwritten, visas were stamped on the passport and whenever we passed through immigration the date of entry and exit were stamped at the borders and manually signed. This was probably the extended use scenario of the seaman's permit book.

What happened around the 1990s?

Around the 1990s the use of computers became more prevalent, the CRS emerged, travel bookings, especially for airlines, were made on the computers, the travel increased multifold, the national id cards became the main document for travel domestically and passports still remained as the main document but underwent transformation, first passports were printed electronically, then a new digital data field was added to them to make them machine-readable, the visa stickers were also printed electronically and pasted on the passports with a standard machine-readable data strips, in standard dual language (English and local), both passports are visa were swiped on the machine to transfer the data and confirm authentication at various stages of travel, for airport access, for check-in, for emigration clearance and for boarding.

How do you use your identity document when you travel now?

21st century is a digital era and the use of commuting has taken to heights with IoT the processes are being automated, manual labors in the travel process are reducing, st touchpoints the humans are being replaced by machines, for domestic travel you still need ID cards and for international travel you still need passports but both of these are now being embedded with a standard chip with memory fields that can be read by machines and facilitate data lodging and time stamping.

Domestically we use ID Cards and internationally a Passport, from purchasing the ticket to, accessing airports, to check in to passing e-gates for boarding, both Identity and ticket information is linked to the identity and using the document is sufficient for through and through the passage.

Additionally for international travel, the visas are becoming electronic, no need to stamp on the passport just link the electronic files together, scan the passport on e-gates, data is linked electronically and right to passage is established, gates open.

What is transforming now and what will happen in the future?

Now that visas are becoming electronic, and there is no need for them to be affixed on the passports, the stampings are taking place electronically by the machines and there would not be a need for so many pages on the passport, this means that it won't be necessary for a passport to be a booklet, it would be reduced to a card with a data chip, then both domestic ID cards and Passports will become the same form factors with duplicity of information one to be used to travel domestically and the other internationally,  this would lead to the convergence, why should resources be used to create two documents serving the same purpose, this means that probably the passport may disappear and only national ID cards will be required to travel internationally as well as domestically. Visas will be applied for using a national ID card which is to contain more relevant behavioral data of the traveler compared to the passports which only contains the international travel data.

Technology is growing at an exponential rate and now there are always some emerging technologies around the corner ready to disrupt the way we operate and one such technology is the identity management technology that is appearing on the convergence of Biometrics, artificial intelligence, and machine learning. propounding that all the data that is embedded in a unique national ID card or the passport can be linked to persons unique biometric prints such as fingerprints, faceprints, voiceprints and iris prints. People may forget the documents to travel, but they won't forget themselves, instead of getting into hassles of reaching out to your document in your wallets and stress of keeping them secured at all times simply use your face to book your tickets, get your visas, check-in at the kiosks, board your flights, just using your Bio prints, machine will read your bio prints, match your data and grant you permission to access and consume services. Machines can learn to differentiate between twins, between right and wrong, can read your heart scans to predict if you are lying or carrying explosives or perform many such things that the patrols at the border are trained to perform and perform it in seconds making the process more reliable and secure. Offering convenience to many genuine travelers.

The real-time data computing of millions of travelers domestically or internationally can be performed by the machines, seamlessly, efficiently, quickly, securely and scalably. provided that the data these machines are accessing is in a standard format.
This can happen if the data is produced by all the generators around the world in a standard format and shared equivocally among the stakeholders.
This is where we are stuck, because this is a huge challenge for the heterogeneous world to produce homogenous data and a point of fear for many where trust among the nations is superficial, every nation has to protect its citizens, sharing information data about the citizens' increases vulnerability, making that data easily understandable by all makes it even more susceptible to misuse. The risks are extremely high as we think of every human being as a potential terrorist.

Technology like blockchain can make the data transparent, available, accessible, undisputable, but the very fact that what it does is scary because we humans are not used to such transparency.  We are in the denial of acceptance that what we hoped for is now possible. Trust is like a very very thin silk thread that can snap and by our own very nature, we humans are mean and excellent in taking advantage of others for our own selfish gains in the name of the survival of the fittest. Morality and ethics for humans are more complex and machines are very simple. Machines are built on ideal logic and reason and when we study criminal psychology humans defy all ideologies, logics and reasons under self-created derogatory circumstances. 

The artificial intelligence of machines can be trained to think and behave like homo sapiens sapiens, soon we will see the machines to be as biased as modern humans, as cunning as them, as untransparent as them and as hypocritical as them. and soon then they will perform selective data standardization and data sharing and then we will see the acceptance and widespread use of biometrics in the global travel and tourism consumption process.
Convenience will still be the numerator and security will still be the denominator and we would not need any formal document to travel just like the good old times.