- Insights
The booking form is already in your traveller's phone
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Kelly Soudan
Every online booking asks the same questions. Full name, exactly as it appears on the passport. Date of birth. Nationality. Document number and expiry. On a phone, at the end of a long search, travellers type all of it by hand.
That's where trips start to go wrong. A middle name left out, two digits swapped in a passport number, a surname typed the way friends spell it rather than the way the government does. None of these errors show up at checkout. They surface later, at online check-in or at the airport desk, as failed check-ins, name-correction fees, support contacts and compensation claims. And some travellers never reach the end of the form at all.
The data already exists, verified
Millions of travellers now carry government-verified identity on their phones: national eID apps such as France Identité, bank-based schemes such as iDIN in the Netherlands, Singpass in Singapore, DigiLocker in India, and ID passes in Google Wallet and Samsung Wallet. By the end of 2026 every EU country must also offer its citizens a European Digital Identity Wallet.
Each of these holds the details a booking form asks for, issued and signed by a government. The question for travel platforms isn't whether verified identity data exists. It's whether the booking flow can accept it.
How Trip.com did it
Trip.com faced the same problem at global scale. Its answer was Customer ID: when a traveller books a flight, they can choose to share verified identity from their mobile wallet instead of retyping it. Hopae provides the infrastructure that requests the credential, verifies it and maps it into Trip.com's booking form. The initiative is supported by IATA under its Data and Technology Strategic Partnership. Read the case study.
Three things about the Trip.com approach matter for any travel platform:
It's an option, not a replacement. Travellers who prefer to type still can. The existing booking flow didn't need rebuilding; wallet identity was added beside it.
The traveller stays in control. They choose to share, and they see what is shared.
It scales by market, not by project. New credential types and countries are added through the same integration, without touching the booking flow again.
Travellers want this. According to the Trip.com case study, more than 80% would share their credentials if their wallet could autofill booking details.
"In an AI-driven, interconnected travel landscape, no single player can create value alone." CT Ooi, Flights, Trip.com Group
Why coverage decides whether it works
A travel platform's customers come from dozens of countries. Prefill only helps if it works for the travellers you actually have. That's why the useful question isn't "how many eIDs?" but "which ones, for my top source markets?" A German traveller, a Singaporean and a Brazilian each carry different credentials. A network that names the schemes it supports, region by region, tells you quickly whether prefill will cover a meaningful share of your bookings.
Beyond the booking form
Verified identity captured at booking doesn't have to stop there. The same credential can carry through to online check-in, loyalty sign-up, hotel registration and, as digital travel credentials mature, the airport. IATA's One ID programme describes this document-light journey. It starts with getting the data right at the first step.
Ready for digital passports
The next credential in travellers' wallets is the passport itself. ICAO, the UN agency that sets passport standards, has defined the Digital Travel Credential (DTC): a digital version of the data on the passport chip, carried on the traveller's phone. It comes in three types:
Type 1: the traveller creates it by reading their own passport chip with their phone, and still carries the physical passport. ICAO says this type can be implemented today.
Type 2: issued by the passport authority and cryptographically bound to the physical passport.
Type 3: issued by the passport authority with no physical passport behind it. This is the long-term destination.
A small set of standards carries these credentials into wallets and booking flows. ICAO Doc 9303 defines the passport data and its security. ISO/IEC 18013-5 and 18013-7 define how mobile documents are presented in person and online. ISO/IEC TS 23220-4, the Photo ID, applies the same mobile document format to identity credentials, and the EU's wallet work uses it with ICAO 9303 for travel credentials. Online, wallets share credentials through OpenID for Verifiable Presentations and the W3C Digital Credentials API, the browser route Trip.com uses.
In Europe, the Commission proposed an EU Digital Travel application in October 2024 so travellers can create digital travel credentials from their passports or ID cards and keep them in the EU Digital Identity Wallet. The Council agreed its position in November 2025, and the app is expected by 2030.
For a booking platform, the practical point is that you don't need to wait. Hopae already supports the Photo ID format, which is aligned with the ICAO DTC standard, and used it in IATA's digital identity proofs of concept. Google Wallet moves its ID passes to the Photo ID format from December 2026. A booking flow that accepts wallet credentials today can accept passport-grade credentials as they arrive, through the same integration.
Where to start
List your top ten source markets by bookings.
Check which government eIDs and wallets travellers in those markets already hold.
Pick one flow (flight booking, hotel check-in or loyalty sign-up) and add verified prefill beside the current form.
Measure completion, time to complete and downstream corrections against your current baseline.
Talk to Hopae about mapping your source markets to the eIDs and wallets your travellers already carry.
