When you’re off on your travels, it’s lovely to relax in the comfort of a luxurious airport lounge, so you’ll want to get in quickly and take advantage of all the facilities on offer. Now you can gain access to fifty domestic Delta lounges even faster by simply scanning your fingerprints. In the past, this is something you’d only ever see in a sci-fi movie, but biometric technology is being increasingly used within the industry to replace boarding passes, and in this case, to allow access to the airport lounge.
Technology developed by Clear
The technology behind this innovation has been developed by biometric tech company Clear, a company that Delta hold a minority stake in. Delta are also investing in experiments to identify passengers via face and iris recognition techniques.
Making travel faster and easier for passengers
By using biometric scanning methods, passing through the various levels of security within an airport can be made much faster and much simpler. Of course it also eliminates the risk of losing your boarding pass, or having a mobile boarding pass suddenly vanish on you because your cell phone has run out of battery!
Want to take part in this new program?
For anyone wanting to make use of this new facility, you need to be a US citizen or permanent resident. If you are already a member of Clear, then you are ready to go. If you’re not a Clear member then you need to enrol on the scheme via Delta Biometrics. You’ll give a copy of your fingerprints which will then be kept on file so you can stroll on into the lounge using nothing but your finger tips.
This is undoubtedly the way forward for the future
This current scheme from Delta is optional, you can, for now, still gain access to the airport lounges using your boarding pass, but it’s most likely that we’re going to see more and more biometric identification systems coming into use over the next few years. It’s not just Delta who are working on this, Lufthansa and JetBlue, amongst others, are also working on these new technologies.
Delta have stated that they are also looking into using biometrics for baggage drop and boarding and are constantly on the look out for new technologies such as voice recognition and chat bots to help make air travel easier and speedier.
Emily is an avid writer with a passion for the travel industry. She also loves learning and writing about nutrition and healthy living. Emily is based in the UK.
