The European Commission’s digital wallet initiative will take effect next year, but it’s just the first step. During a session at Phocuswright Europe 2025, industry leaders sat down to discuss the impact of these digital identity wallets and how artificial intelligence (AI) will come into play.
Nick Price, founder of Netsys Technology and co-chair of the Decentralized Identity Foundation (DIF) Hospitality & Travel Special Interest Group, said DIF is working on standards and use cases for self-sovereign identity in the travel industry and trying to address a major gap: traveler profile and preferences.
“Anybody who’s in the hospitality industry will know that this isn’t just a name and address and information derived from a passport,” Price said. In reality, this may include preferences about where you sit on a plane, the proximity of your hotel room to the elevator, your allergies, etc.
This information is “deep and personal and meaningful, and it’s constantly changing,” Price said. “It is the grease in the machine of travel that actually enables the surprise and delight moments to happen—and that information is locked away in loyalty systems that are behind the bars of individual travel providers today, and they just simply are out of date, incomplete and unused and unusable in the most part.”
Jamie Smith, founder of Customer Futures, also pointed to traveler preferences and profile history being “locked up” in customer relationship management systems and travel provider technologies.
To achieve a truly seamless journey, that information should be held by the customer.
“The only place to organize this information is the individual. The only 360-degree view of the customer is the customer, and there’s no tech on that side," Smith said.
The concept of “empowerment tech,” then, involves three things: a digital wallet, a data store and AI agents, like Perplexity, for the customer.
Overall, the digital wallet is set to have a “major impact on the world of travel,” Annet Steenbergen, advisor for the European Union Digital Wallet Consortium, said. And that's not just for consumers but also for businesses that “will be able to instantaneously verify that you’re dealing with another real business,” she said.
The trio also commented on what the full traveler journey will look like in the future and how digital wallets can add new revenue streams and improve security.
Watch the full session moderated by Mike Coletta, senior manager of research and innovation at Phocuswright, below:
Executive Panel: Agents, ID and the Future of Travel