Automated ID Verification to Enable Simple and Accurate Mobile Self Check-In for Wizz Air Passengers

Wizz Air is Europe’s fastest-growing and most sustainable airline. The company has one of the most unique destination networks, which includes over 1,100 routes and 194 airports in 51 countries. Wizz Air operates 153 aircraft with an average age of 5 years and employs over 6,000 aviation professionals.

From its first flight in 2004 to celebrating a remarkable milestone of 250 million passengers carried by 2022, the passion of Wizz Air to make flying affordable to everyone, everywhere, is what fuels the company to keep soaring higher. As an ultra-low-cost business, the company’s work is centred around no-frills travel available for everyone at the lowest price possible, creating equal value for all passengers while remaining conscious of environmental responsibility.

Regula SDK is a cornerstone of this project. It makes travelling easier for passengers, increasing their loyalty and satisfaction. It helps us avoid errors associated with manual typing of personal data. It simplifies a number of vital procedures that the company is now revising.

— Roland Tischner, Officer Wizz Air Hungary Operations

Challenge

Wizz Air is currently consolidating efforts to uplevel the before-flight experience for passengers, starting with their desire to book a ticket till boarding at the gate. It’s a long-term transformation process that requires revising a lot of vital procedures. Among key objectives are:

• Improving the quality of input data by introducing automatic data capture and recognition. This will eliminate human-factor errors and expedite data processing
• Complying with regulation standards; informing a passenger what kind of documents they might need for a certain trip and making sure they have them on hand before boarding
• Increasing customers’ loyalty by simplifying and fast-tracking all the tedious paperwork and going through compulsory checking.

At the first stage of implementing this new strategy, Wizz Air concentrated on introducing self check-in that could be easy and accurate at the same time. “The idea of a fast and secure self check-in based on ID scanning with a smartphone camera came up pretty long ago, and the pandemic has highlighted its importance and necessity,” says Roland Tischner, Officer Wizz Air Hungary Operations.

Solution

A much desired self check-in based on a mere scanning of an ID is now available for all Wizz Air travellers via the official mobile app.

The solution is based on automated ID verification flawlessly performed by Regula Document Reader SDK. Thanks to the industry’s largest document template database that Regula maintains, ID authentication is available for a vast number of identity documents coming from 248 countries and territories in more than 138 languages. It opens the Wizz Air travel geography to almost anyone in the world regardless of the origin of their IDs.

The new self check-in procedure is as fast and simple as possible. All a passenger needs to do is to scan their ID with a mobile device camera. Personal data recognition and verification is done automatically by Regula Document Reader SDK that is embedded in the Wizz Air application. The app also suggests a passenger save their document in order to avoid repetitive scanning and verification for future bookings and flights, which also contributes to comfort and ease of travel.
Such a time-effective approach facilitates and speeds-up more than 10 million yearly check-ins and boardings using fast and accurate ID scan and verification. As a result, passengers can enjoy a way more convenient and secure travel experience leaving in the time-wasting manual data entry and weary queues at control points in the past.

Regula Document Reader SDK has a powerful OCR (optical character recognition) engine that guarantees accurate data capture and recognition throughout the whole document datapage: machine readable (MRZ) and visual inspection zones, RFID chips and barcode if present. The solution also identifies the type of a document and the country of its origin and verifies it against the Regula’s abundant document template database. This functionality helps to make the application a lot more user friendly and increase its usability: it saves passengers extra steps and clicks on their way to a completed check-in form, saves multiple ID resubmissions and proof-reads to make sure their personal data is provided correctly, and therefore, offers a lot more sophisticated UX. Such a comprehensive verification also helps to spot fraud at its early stages.

Result

Besides its contribution to the authenticity check of travel documents, Regula’s software also allows Wizz Air to reduce expenses related to multiple identity checks and printing boarding passes. Not only does Regula’s solution help to assure the legitimacy of a traveller, but also reduces the amount of paperwork and needless printing. It makes Wizz Air an even more sustainable airline and sits well with the air company’s philosophy of Flying The Greenest.