Biometrics in Tourism: Issues and Challenges

In tourism, biometrics have become a major technology application for user authentication in premises such as hotels and airports. The main reasons of utilizing biometrics for access control are convenience, high security, and reliability. Biometrics refer to any human trait, for instance, fingerprint, retina, palm print, and voice, which is used to establish an identity. It is already used extensively in many airports worldwide to facilitate automated identity verification, while the backbone is linked to police criminal databases, which enables identification of possible terrorists, victims of human trafficking, or tourists with past convictions. Additionally, many hotels have substituted traditional door locks or card access with biometrics for its convenience. However, there are some concerns associated with biometric applications, for instance, information privacy, physical privacy, and contamination fears. Tourists worry whether the storage mechanism of biometric data is safe from hacking and leakage to terrorist organizations. If biometric data were compromised, tourists would have to surrender different biometric identifiers because biometric features are irrevocable (permanent). Further, fear of contamination can be much more apparent on touch-based biometric applications such as fingerprint scanners. This concern is aggravated especially during pandemic outbreaks such as COVID-19, Ebola, and SARS. In a nutshell, this chapter aims to provide a holistic perspective on potential issues of biometrics in the tourism industry.