Organizations representing Europe’s largest airlines and airports warn of chaos and long queues unless countries better coordinate the release of the European Covid-19 digital certificate and ensure that passengers are checked before they arrive at airports, athina984.gr reports.
The European Covid-19 Digital Certificate is due to take effect on Thursday 1 July, but the ACI International Airports Agency and A4E, IATA, and ERA have warned in a letter to EU national leaders that a disturbing mosaic of approaches “across the continent.
“As passenger traffic increases in the coming weeks, the risk of chaos at European airports is real,” the agencies noted in a joint letter sent to Reuters today.
Digital certificates are designed to show, via rapid response codes (QR codes), whether passengers are fully vaccinated, have recently recovered from Covid-19, or have a negative test.
They are designed to be used for travel across the EU from 1 July but require additional controls and the appropriate code reading equipment.
The letter points out that the only way to avoid huge queues and delays during the peak of the summer season is to implement a system according to which both the vaccination certificate and the passenger tracking forms are processed remotely before the passenger arrives. at the airport.
Checks should be carried out only in the country of departure and not on arrival and national governments should manage health data and provide equipment for checking QR codes, the letter noted.
“A high level of fragmentation and differentiation in the implementation of DCC… as well as the constant repetition of document checks in many countries, is worrying,” he said.
ACI Europe General Manager Olivier Jankovec, one of the signatories of the letter, argued that members of the group “are starting to worry a lot”.
“Coping with this increase will be an unprecedented challenge,” he said. The size of the verification cases that are still done manually at airports “worries him a lot,” he continued.
Travel time at airports during a trip has doubled to 3 hours from 1-1 / 2 hours prior to the pandemic, said Rafael Schwartzman, IATA Vice President for Europe and another signatory.
If there are no changes and the capacity returns to pre-Covid levels, that time could theoretically be raised to five or even eight hours, an unacceptable amount of time, he said.
Ahead of a meeting of European countries tomorrow Tuesday on digital certification, the European Commission has issued guidelines for the Member States addressing some of the concerns, noting that ten different combinations of controls have been designed by different countries.
This risks leading to “unnecessary overlapping measures and consequently queues and overcrowding at airports,” said A4E CEO Thomas Reinart, underlining that the situation risks undermining passenger confidence.
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