Business travellers and holidaymakers moving through Heathrow airport will soon be able to do so more quickly thanks to facial recognition technology.
The UK’s largest airport, which is a just a 15 minute journey from Windsor, is a hub for business travel. It is also a favourite among visitors coming to the UK for holidays from all over Europe, as well as from more far flung destinations.
Now, the airport has announced that it will be introducing new facial recognition technology that will help make moving through the airport faster and less stressful.
The new technology will first be deployed at at the check-in stage for passengers. The system will scan passengers’ faces to verify their identity. Then, at the security and boarding stages of a journey, the system will automatically verify their identity without the need for passengers to show their boarding passes and passports again.
Simon Wilcox, programme manager for automation at Heathrow, stated that the airport wants to get to a point where passengers can move through the terminals without stopping. At the moment, even with the new technology, natural bottlenecks still occur at certain points.
Heathrow is the first airport to roll out the facial recognition technology following a successful trial over the summer of 2018. Wilcox said that, during the trials, passengers were actually rather confused about the lack of queues as they were so used to lining up and waiting around at airports.
