IATA and ICAO prepare iAPI and DTA to streamline travel document checks

At check-in, the agent often relies on a printed PDF that cannot be authenticated. The International Civil Aviation Organization has endorsed a solution to this problem, which will eventually change what you must present before boarding.

What the boarding agent really sees

Airlines are required to ensure, before departure, that passengers hold documents required by the destination country. For a visa sticker in a passport, verification is visual and relies on standardized security features that have existed for decades. The airline cannot know if your authorization has since been revoked. Nor can it verify whether a single-entry or limited-entry authorization has already been used—on a paper visa, each use is annotated in the passport, enabling immediate reading.

For an electronic visa, there is no such system. The proof you present may be an email, PDF or screenshot, with formats and data varying by country. The IATA working group on control authorities, in a best practices document published in June 2026, describes proofs that are easy to falsify and cannot be reliably verified by any third party. Since one airline may serve more than eighty countries, training staff to recognize a hundred different formats is not realistic.

Direct consequences at the check-in counter

This ambiguity comes at a cost at the counter. Without a reliable verification mechanism, airlines resort to manual checks and ad-hoc procedures, leading to boarding denials, overbookings, and blocked arrivals.

The IATA document highlights another concrete issue: printed e-visa confirmations often prevent use of online check-in and self-service bag drop kiosks. Even with a perfectly valid authorization in hand, you’re sent to the counter. Travelers with older authorizations face another common hurdle: finding an email confirmation sometimes received years earlier. IATA flags this as a recurring problem for electronic travel authorizations—and one reason to adopt standardized proofs.

Two tools: iAPI and DTA

The international framework sets out two ways to verify an authorization that isn’t glued into a passport.

The first is interactive Advance Passenger Information (iAPI). At check-in, the airline sends your passport data to the destination’s authorities, which query their own records and return an ‘board’ or ‘no-board’ response. No physical document needs to be shown; the check relates to the state-held record, making reference numbers or printouts unnecessary.

The second is the Digital Travel Authorization (DTA), defined by ICAO. It is a standardized proof displayed on-screen or printed, with predictable fields and a digitally signed 2D barcode. The barcode contains the displayed data and reads like the machine-readable zone of a passport, allowing verification where no interactive system exists.

Both approaches are compatible. The DTA also serves as a fallback when iAPI is unavailable, and handles multi-segment journeys where only the airline operating the final leg to the destination receives a validation response; the outbound carrier has no certainty.

An ICAO facilitation panel meeting in Montreal from 20 to 24 April 2026 adopted new definitions of digital travel authorization and related provisions: the adoption of the umbrella term “travel authorizations” covering visas, e-visas and electronic authorizations; strengthened links between iAPI and these authorizations; and the DTA becoming the reference solution where no interactive system is available.

The panel also endorsed a recommended practice encouraging states to embed immigration and security checks into the responses returned to carriers.

The texts were endorsed by the panel, marking a stage in the ICAO process before any application can begin. No applicability date has been made public, so nothing changes immediately for the applications travelers submit today.

Transit regimes most at risk

For travelers the biggest exposure lies in regimes relying on a visa from a third country. Many states waive entry or transit for holders of a valid visa from a designated third nation; visa-free transit regimes add their own conditions.

These have always worked by visual inspection of the passport sticker. As issuing countries go fully electronic, verification becomes harder. iAPI links a carrier to the state that issued the authorization, not to other states—so a transit country cannot vet a third-country digital authorization. The IATA document notes no state yet accepts a third-country electronic travel authorization for this purpose.

In practice, if your itinerary hinges on an exemption tied to a visa you hold elsewhere, or on visa-free transit, keep supporting evidence ready and verify conditions with the transit country before booking. This is where the gap between a valid authorization and a verifiable one most often causes a boarding refusal.

Digital isn’t automatically simpler yet

Officials still argue that electronic authorizations reduce consulate visits, passport mailings, processing delays and online tracking. We made a similar case regarding the dematerialization of airport formalities, which follows the same identity-traveler trajectory.

Verification has lagged behind. Until both tools are rolled out, travelers bear the burden of proof: keep the issuance confirmation in presentable form and understand that counter staff must accept what you show, because no state query is possible. Those confirmations also contain personal data whose retention periods vary by scheme.