In Europe, the digital identity transformation is at a turning point: The EU Digital Identity Wallet Consortium's pilot project has been completed, and two large-scale trials have been launched,
changing how travelers prove their identities across borders, hotels, airlines, ferries and digital services.
The findings offer both a lifeline and a call to action for the hospitality industry, which has long been stuck with manual passport checks and faces unwieldy regulations.
At the latest Decentralized Identity Foundation (DIF) Hospitality & Travel Special Interest Group (SIG) session, industry leaders, pilot participants and technology providers unpacked the results
of the EWC pilot and explored how the upcoming EU Digital Identity (EUDI) Wallet could simplify travel.
Their message was clear: Digital identity adoption can significantly ease the traveler journey and reduce the workload for travel service providers. But there are still gaps in digital identity standards to reconcile.
A century of passport evolution reaches its digital era
The session’s presentation opened by tracing identity’s evolution over a full century, which shows the rate of progress has accelerated since governments adopted digital systems. While photo ID passports remained the norm for 60 years, the past 40 years
have seen significant improvement.
EUDI Wallet is the next step: a secure, government-issued digital identity container that can store credentials such as a digital passport, driving license, payment instruments and verified attributes. It is coming together at a critical turning point
in identity verification as demand in regulated markets—hotels, airlines, banks, telcos—has overtaken that for border controls.
“One of the things that I took away [is that] there is more use of digital travel credentials for regulated markets than there are for border crossing. That’s significant,” said Nick Price, CEO of NetSys Technology and
chair of the SIG.
Hotel identity checks have increased from 2.8 billion in 2015 to 3 billion in 2025. Airline identity checks have risen from 0.9 billion to 1.1 billion over the past decade. Border checks have declined from 1.3 billion to 1.25 billion during this period.
One of the things that I took away [is that] there is more use of digital travel credentials for regulated markets than there are for border crossing. That’s significant.
Nick Price, DIF, NetSys Technology
Digital identity offers the most efficiency gains where identity checks are the most frequent—and that is overwhelmingly in hospitality and aviation, not at border crossings.
The EWC pilot: Real guests, real hotels, real data
The EWC was one of four initial EU-funded Large Scale Pilot projects (LSPs), running from 2023 to 2025, involving 24 countries and approximately 80 public and private partners.
More than 550 public bodies and companies participated in the LSPs, testing over 11 major use cases in real conditions across 26 EU member states plus Norway, Iceland and Ukraine. The projects also contributed to the “Wallet Toolbox”—the technical and
governance foundation for national EUDI Wallets.
For the EWC pilot, hospitality became a headline use case.
“In the scope of the large-scale pilot, we were able to make real transactions with real people, real money, real data,” said Laurent Loup, market sector senior manager at Sicpa. “It’s really, really
exciting.”
The pilot’s travel scenarios included:
- Hotel check-in (Benidorm, Spain)
- Airline check-in and boarding (Lufthansa, Finnair, Amadeus)
- Museum age verification (Buda Castle, Budapest)
- Ferry ticketing (Fast Ferries, Greece)
Spain: A stress test for hotel identity management
Spain provided the most intense proving ground. Royal Decree 933/2021—which went into effect in December 2024—requires hotels and holiday rental providers to collect 42 separate pieces of personal data from every guest, including identity document details,
relationships between minors and adults, payment details and contract data for the stay.
“At least, you must fill out different information about every person that’s in the hotel,” said Leire Bilbao, managing director of Visit Benidorm. “At the moment, it is really complicated.”
The new requirement creates operational bottlenecks, especially in high-volume leisure destinations where many guests may need to be processed at any time.
“My own personal experience checking into a hotel in Barcelona earlier this year, 20 plus minutes to get through passport verification—miserable from beginning to end,” Price said.
The bottlenecks caused by the requirements are resulting in queues, errors and staff stress. There is also a regulatory risk, with non-compliance fines ranging from €100 to €30,000.
“Honestly, it’s a nightmare,” Loup said.
What the European wallet enables is actually a new user experience.
Laurent Loup, Sicpa
In Benidorm, the EWC pilot enabled the first EU citizen ever to check into a hotel using the EUDI Wallet, automating Spain’s complex data requirements.
“What the European wallet enables is actually a new user experience,” Loup said, contrasting it with online check-in, which is “very cumbersome” and “requires manual entries that create a lot of errors.”
The digital wallet process is instantaneous. “Once the user consents, then all the data is sent automatically, and all the data is then available here in a few seconds,” Loup said.
Hotels need PhotoID, not just PID
There are gaps in the standards for personal identity credentials. Loup stressed that while the EU’s base person identification data (PID) contains only name, surname and date of birth, it lacks a unique identifier and a photo, making it unsuitable for
hotels and airlines.
The Digital Travel Credential (DTC) Type 1, created by the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO), also falls short because it does not support selective disclosure, making it incompatible with the General Data Protection Regulation. While ICAO
is drafting a DTC Type 2, it may not address selective disclosure.
The EWC pilot, therefore, leaned on PhotoID, an ISO-standard credential that contains all passport attributes.
“Regulated markets require a digital credential containing passport-like attributes to uniquely identify their customers and comply with regulations,” Loup said.
Airlines are moving faster than hotels—with IATA’s help
The SIG discussion highlighted varying progress across travel industry sectors. Airlines are more coordinated—and farther ahead—than the hospitality industry, thanks to the International Air Transport Association’s (IATA) focus on ensuring workable standards.
“That’s one of the strengths of the airline business. They have a federation like IATA … driving all the architecture and the best practice and lobbying towards governments and other stakeholders,” Loup said. “If there were a similar organization in hospitality,
this would be very appreciated by the community.”
“It would make sense for the hotels to work together, to speak with one voice about what they need,” Price said.
Airlines, however, are already prototyping biometric boarding. “This is really one of the objectives that we are working on at the moment, also at IATA,” Loup said. “Use your face as the token … from the baggage check to security check to boarding.”
This effort aligns with the results of IATA’s 2025 Global Passenger Survey, which showed that:
- 78% of travelers want a smartphone-based digital ID + wallet + loyalty card
- 50% have already used biometrics (up from 46% in 2024)
- 74% would willingly share biometrics to skip queues
- Digital wallet usage jumped from 20% to 28% year-over-year
“Passengers want to manage their travel the same way they manage many other aspects of their lives—on their smartphones and using digital ID. As experience grows with digital processes from booking to baggage claim, the message that travelers are sending
in this year’s GPS is clear: They like it, and they want more of it. There is an important caveat, which is the need to continue building trust, so cybersecurity remains a priority. Cybersecurity must be core to the end-to-end digital transformation
of how we book, pay, and experience air travel,” said Nick Careen, IATA’s SVP of operations, safety and security.
As PhocusWire recently reported, Lufthansa and Amadeus will run EUDI Wallet tests across Europe beginning in late 2025, specifically examining passport-free
online check-in, automatic API data transfers, biometric bag-drop and more.
Passengers want to manage their travel the same way they manage many other aspects of their lives—on their smartphones and using digital ID.
Nick Careen, IATA
The goal is to use digital identity as a seamless layer across the journey, interoperable with the EU’s national wallet ecosystem.
Apple also recently launched its digital ID, allowing users to create a digital ID in Apple Wallet using their U.S. passport. It will be implementednat 250 TSA checkpoints and uses passport chip reading, a secure face biometric scan, encrypted on device storage and selective disclosure for sharing only necessary data.
The digital ID cannot yet replace a passport for international travel, but its roll-out in the U.S. reflects demand. If Apple normalizes digital identity for 1.2 billion iPhone users, European hotels and airlines cannot afford to lag.
New EU pilots are starting—and hospitality is invited
Two new EU pilots began in 2025:
- APTITUDE: covers travel, transport and mobile vehicle registration certificates
- WE BUILD: covers business banking, payments, B2B credentials
“They are still searching for some volunteers … probably on the hospitality [side],” Loup said during the DIF Hospitality & Travel SIG session.
However, he added that the funding has already been allocated. Hotels joining now must do so as “associated partners.” While they would need to cover their own costs, they can gain influence over the next phase of wallet standardization.
Price identified three areas still missing from Europe’s digital identity framework:
- Access control: digital credentials to unlock rooms, gyms and lounges
- Reservation credentials: identity-bound booking confirmations and payments
- Traveler preferences/profiles: a privacy-controlled alternative to loyalty data silos
Without these, hotels risk falling behind airlines once again. “There’s a lot to learn, a lot to benefit from—and get involved,” Price said, urging the sector to participate.
The standards that will govern digital identity in Europe for the next decade are being drafted, and airlines are writing more of them than hotels.
“Let’s make sure that the hospitality and tourism components play a full part in the next stages of the European journey to European digital ID,” Price said.