The Passport-less Airport

Changi Airport has fully implemented passport-less immigration clearance. It sounds cool not having to take out your passport and keeping it back safely multiple times as you traverse through the airport. I had to check it out, and here’s my experience.

First, it seems obvious, but in case it isn’t clear, you definitely still need to have your passport with you. Even if you don’t need your passport in Singapore, you would most certainly need it in the other country you are travelling to. In any case, you actually still do need your physical passport anyway in Singapore. Even for Singaporean/PR travellers.

With online check-ins and mobile boarding passes, the pre-departure experience has become remarkably pleasant in recent years. If you don’t have any luggage to check-in, you could literally go straight to immigration and skip all the usual check-in queues in the departure hall. For those unaware, mobile boarding passes can be stored in your smartphone “wallet” (Android and iOS), so you don’t even need to print out or store a screenshot of your boarding pass.

I use Android, and I found Google Wallet integrates some extra information, such as informing me of my gate, which the airline’s app (Scoot in this case) doesn’t even provide the information. It’s a nice bonus.

Back our passport-less airport. My physical passport was first requested by the police who screened passengers before entering the immigration area. So yes, most definitely, you are going to have to take out your passport. It might not be needed at the actual immigration gantry, but you would need it to enter the immigration area.

The physical passport was again required at the gate holding room. Second time of having to take out the passport.

The passport-less immigration clearance is, literally, to just do away with the passport at the immigration gantry. You only avoid needing to present a physical passport a grand total of just one time.

On hindsight, I wonder what the big deal about passport-less immigration clearance is then. You still need to bring your passport. You still need to show it multiple times at the airport. This passport-less immigration basically just saves a tiny bit of time because the immigration gate can identify you without your passport. In my experience, whilst the passport reader had indeed been quite slow to begin with, through no fault of the passenger, the real delay is that the facial/iris/fingerprint verification takes awfully long, and depending on the person, may have a high failure rate.

Now that we have passport-less immigration, can we work towards replacing physical passport verification with using Singpass? I get it that it’s hard for a human to compare Singpass details with the mobile boarding pass when both are on the same smartphone, and only one or the other can be shown at any one time. I’m sure this is but a simple technical challenge that can be easily overcome.