IATA Survey: Biometrics Hit Majority as AI Reshapes Travel, Immigration Deters 43%

The airline industry's largest annual passenger survey, released Tuesday by the International Air Transport Association at the World Passenger Symposium in Macao, found that nearly half of travelers worldwide now use artificial intelligence to plan their trips — while a separate 43 percent say immigration entry requirements have led them to abandon plans to visit a destination, a figure that jumped 10 percentage points in a single year.

The 2026 IATA Global Passenger Survey, which drew responses from more than 10,000 travelers across more than 200 countries, captures a deepening split in how technology is reshaping commercial aviation. Passengers are enthusiastically adopting AI-powered search tools and biometric airport processing — yet the structural friction imposed by visa systems, border complexity, and data-privacy concerns is growing faster than the industry's digital solutions can address it.

Nick Careen, IATA's Senior Vice President for Operations, Safety and Security, said that passengers are demonstrating strong trust in technology to improve their travel experience — and that it is now up to governments to act.

Biometrics Cross the Majority Threshold for the First Time

For the first time in the survey's history, a majority of respondents — 58 percent — reported experiencing biometric processing at an airport during the past 12 months, up from 50 percent in 2025 and from just 34 percent in 2022. Of those who passed through a biometric checkpoint, 87 percent described themselves as satisfied or very satisfied, the highest approval rating the survey has ever recorded for that category.

The trend reflects a significant expansion of facial-recognition-based passenger processing at major international hubs. Airports including Changi in Singapore, Hamad International in Doha, and a growing number of U.S. Customs and Border Protection pre-clearance facilities have deployed end-to-end biometric corridors that allow passengers to move from check-in through boarding without presenting a physical document. IATA has branded its own interoperability framework for this category One ID.

Willingness to participate remains high: 78 percent of respondents said they would share biometric data in exchange for being able to skip document checks at airports. Among those who expressed reservations, the leading concerns were data breach risk (cited by 59 percent of biometric users), concern about data being shared with third parties (49 percent), and lack of clarity about how data would be used (41 percent).

The findings on registered digital travel credentials are perhaps the more strategically significant result. Eighty-four percent of respondents said they would enroll a verified digital identity at online check-in if it meant passport-free transit, 82 percent said they would register at the time of booking, and 82 percent said they would use a smartphone wallet that combines flight booking, identity verification, and boarding confirmation. Seventy-five percent said they would prefer to register their biometrics once and have that credential recognized across every subsequent journey — a model that aligns with the international standard ICAO is advancing under its Digital Travel Credentials program.

How Digital Travel Credentials Work — and Where the Technology Currently Stands

The technical infrastructure underpinning that consumer preference is more developed than public awareness of it might suggest. ICAO's Digital Travel Credential standard allows a traveler's verified identity to be cryptographically derived from their physical passport chip and stored in a secure element on a smartphone. When the traveler presents at an airport checkpoint, the biometric comparison — a facial match — occurs between the live image captured at the gate and the credential stored on the device, rather than against a centralized airline or government database.

This architecture addresses the data-breach concern directly. Because the reference biometric lives on the traveler's device rather than a shared server, there is no central repository for a malicious actor to compromise at scale. The comparison result — a match or a non-match — is transmitted to border systems; the biometric itself is not. The distinction matters for the 59 percent of respondents who cited data-breach risk as their primary concern: the specific risk they identified is structurally reduced by an on-device model, which is why the DTC standard has been designed this way.

ICAO's DTC program has attracted participation from countries at various stages of readiness, ranging from active pilot programs to framework adoption. Widespread passenger-facing deployment remains limited, however. The gap between what consumers say they want (75 percent want register-once recognition across all journeys) and what most airports currently offer (a physical document scan at most checkpoints) is the gap the industry is working to close.

IATA's One ID trials have produced documented efficiency results at participating airports. The U.S. CBP Simplified Arrival program, now active at more than 30 U.S. international airports, represents the largest-scale deployment of the model and has provided the operational evidence base that IATA has used to advocate for broader government adoption.

The principal technical barrier is interoperability rather than biometric accuracy. A DTC issued under one country's passport cannot yet be systematically accepted at another country's border control without bilateral or multilateral agreement on the credential standard. Until that framework is in place, the seamless end-to-end experience 75 percent of respondents prefer remains dependent on individual airport and government choices rather than a universal protocol.

AI Has Entered the Travel Planning Mainstream — but Autonomous Booking Lags

The survey's finding that 49 percent of respondents used artificial intelligence in travel planning during 2026 represents a significant adoption milestone for a tool category that barely existed as a consumer product three years ago. The breakdown of how travelers use AI reveals where the technology has genuinely transformed behavior and where trust has yet to develop.

Flight search was the most common reported use (21 percent of respondents), followed by finding the cheapest available fare (19 percent) and using AI for destination inspiration when travelers had no fixed itinerary (17 percent). These top use cases are primarily research and discovery functions — stages where an AI assistant provides structured information and the human retains the booking decision. The pattern reflects what has become a consistent finding across travel-sector AI surveys: consumer appetite for AI assistance is high, but appetite for autonomous AI decision-making is substantially lower.

The competitive market has moved quickly in the 12 months since IATA's 2025 survey. Booking.com has integrated a conversational AI assistant into its mobile app that can iterate on destination and accommodation suggestions across a multi-turn conversation, drawing on its inventory while incorporating user context about travel dates, budget, and preferences. Expedia has deployed similar functionality. Google's AI Mode, which moved to general availability in the United States in 2026, added the ability to complete restaurant reservations through its AI interface, with direct flight booking on its product roadmap. Mindtrip launched what it describes as the first end-to-end AI flight booking product — connecting to Sabre's global distribution system and processing payment through PayPal — making it the first consumer tool to take a traveler from an AI-generated itinerary to a confirmed ticket without leaving the interface.

A separate survey from Booking.com published in 2025 found that 89 percent of respondents wanted AI assistance with some aspect of travel planning but only 12 percent said they would be comfortable letting AI make decisions on their behalf without human review. The IATA data tracks with that pattern. The technology's highest adoption rates are in informational tasks — discovery, comparison, search — where errors are low-stakes and easy to correct. Committed booking transactions, which involve payment, non-refundable fares, and scheduling consequences, remain domains where most travelers want explicit confirmation authority. As AI travel tools accumulate track records on booking accuracy and improve at handling exceptions and cancellations, the share willing to delegate booking autonomy is likely to grow from the 49 percent already using some form of AI assistance.

Immigration Complexity Is Growing Faster Than the Technology Can Compensate

The survey's sharpest finding may be the one least connected to product launches: 43 percent of respondents said that entry and visa requirements have actively discouraged them from choosing a particular destination, up from 33 percent in 2025. That 10-percentage-point increase in a single year indicates immigration friction is not a stable background condition but an actively worsening constraint on international travel demand.

Of those who reported being deterred, 53 percent identified the complexity of visa requirements as their primary reason. Privacy concerns around sharing personal data for visa applications were cited by 17 percent, as were the direct cost of obtaining a visa. These proportions echo the pattern seen in the biometrics data: travelers are not categorically opposed to sharing information with governments — 86 percent said they would share immigration information digitally before departure (up from 83 percent in 2025) — but they are specifically opposed to systems perceived as opaque, expensive, or inconsistently administered.

Careen said that governments must make it easier to travel and that the continued requirement for physical passport presentation is increasingly at odds with the preferences of a majority of passengers.

The preference data points in a specific direction. Forty-five percent of respondents said they prefer immigration procedures to happen before they arrive at an airport, up from 41 percent the previous year. Sixty percent said they prefer to obtain visas online. These numbers describe a system that passengers would readily use: a digital pre-clearance workflow where identity is verified, visa eligibility is determined, and border decisions are made before the traveler has packed a bag — rather than after a transatlantic flight in an immigration hall queue.

The economic consequence of the deterrence figure is difficult to quantify precisely, but the directional implications are significant. IATA projects the aviation industry will carry approximately 5.2 billion passengers in 2026. If 43 percent are declining to visit destinations specifically because of entry requirement complexity, that represents a structural ceiling on international travel growth that biometric technology alone cannot lift — because the constraint is in the visa application stage, which precedes the airport experience entirely. Regions with less extensive visa-free arrangements face a structurally higher version of this problem: travelers without strong passport access encounter the friction at every stage of planning, not only at the airport.

Privacy Concerns Complicate the Consent Model for Both Biometrics and Immigration Data

The simultaneous existence of high biometric adoption enthusiasm (78 percent willing to share) and pronounced data-privacy concern (59 percent worried about breaches) is not contradictory — it reflects a conditional consent model that will likely define regulatory debates over AI and biometric systems in aviation for the next several years. Travelers appear willing to share biometric data when the benefit is tangible and immediate, when the reference biometric remains on their own device rather than a central server, and when the administering institution is one they have some prior reason to trust.

The 49 percent who cited concern about data being shared with third parties and the 41 percent who cited lack of clarity about data use identify the conditions under which that consent breaks down — and those are precisely the conditions that apply to systems where airline or airport data flows to government agencies, or where the legal basis for processing is not communicated clearly to the traveler.

European regulators have classified biometric data processing within the EU AI Act's high-risk AI system category, creating conformity assessment, transparency, and human oversight obligations for airport operators that go beyond existing aviation security frameworks. Compliance timelines for high-risk AI systems remain under active legislative review, with the European Parliament voting to extend the original August 2026 deadline — meaning many airports currently deploying biometric systems may face compliance requirements they have not yet fully scoped. A 2024 U.S. Government Accountability Office report separately found that real-world performance data on biometric identification technologies across demographic groups remains understudied — a concern that, if unaddressed, creates both accuracy and equity exposure as the programs scale.

The Gap Is Now Governance, Not Technology

The IATA 2026 Global Passenger Survey describes an industry where the technology required to deliver seamless international travel — biometric identity, on-device digital credentials, AI-assisted planning — is functionally available and increasingly trusted by consumers. The gap between the current passenger experience and what 75 to 86 percent of respondents say they prefer is, in the survey's consistent framing, primarily a governance and government-adoption problem.

The 10-percentage-point acceleration in immigration deterrence in a single year is the number that should concern both governments and the airline industry most. Biometric adoption rising 8 percentage points has a reasonably clear path to continued improvement: more airports add infrastructure, more travelers use it, high satisfaction data supports further investment. An accelerating deterrence rate driven by visa complexity has no automatic technological fix — because the system producing the friction is outside the aviation industry's direct control.

The industry will watch whether the governments that have committed to the ICAO Digital Travel Credential framework move from technical participation to operational deployment at scale before the next annual survey. IATA's 2027 GPS will test whether digital pre-clearance preferences, online visa access, and register-once biometric recognition have begun to translate from the 86 percent who say they want them into a measurable reduction in the 43 percent who say entry requirements are making them stay home.