The travel digital identity gap, and why blockchain bridges it
Late September, I’m in Heraklion for our Travel Un’chained conference. Michael Ros from Sleap.io and I are at the resort reception, and they hand us forms (name, ID number, address, all the fields) before taking our ID cards and disappearing to make photocopies. In 2025. Facial recognition at airports, digital wallets on our phones, and a process still requiring a paper scan. I know we both used the anecdote to smile with other attendees, so with this article I officially exhaust its value as storytelling.
Fast forward to just before Christmas. I’m booking a trip to Koh Chang, car rental and flight through Expedia, hotel through Booking.com. For the car I gave the credit card as guarantee; at pickup, same card again please, plus driver’s license (even if it’s the nth time with them), plus passport. The hotel: Booking.com didn’t pass my details through, so at front desk I show passport again. Plus of course the usual, showing passport thrice between flight check-in and boarding. Seven touchpoints, seven times presenting the same credentials, zero coordination between any of them.
This is travel in 2025. The infrastructure connecting identity verification to travel transactions doesn’t exist. But it’s being built.
Why identity, why now
In July I wrote about our experience in the ECB’s digital euro Pioneer Programme, where we developed architectures bridging traditional banking with blockchain and demonstrating that the two can work together rather than compete. We called it “currency neutrality”: CBDCs, stablecoins like the ones we have on Camino or the ones we’re partnering to bring on (such as the newly announced Qivalis by ten major European banks), tokenized deposits. We orchestrate whatever serves travel, on-chain or off-chain, as the payment rails are multiplying.
In my recent article on agentic distribution I noted that AI agents need identity and accountability infrastructure to transact. You can’t have autonomous booking without knowing who’s booking and whether they can pay.
This piece picks up that thread. Identity is the next layer. We’re applying the same agnostic principle as in payment: not betting on which standard wins, but building coordination infrastructure that works across all of them.
EUDI is coming. Travel needs to be ready.
The EU Digital Identity Regulation was adopted in May 2024. Every Member State must provide a wallet by late 2026, and by late 2027 transport, banking, health, and telecommunications must accept them. Booking.com, Amazon, Meta: all required to recognize EUDI Wallets.
The technology works: Lufthansa and Amadeus ran trials last summer, Spain tested wallet-based hotel check-in, Finland’s Digital Travel Credential pilot processed borders in 8 seconds versus 25 for traditional kiosks. IATA reports 74% of travelers would share biometrics to skip queues, which means the market is responding, and analysts forecast digital travel identities generating $4.6 billion in revenue by 2029, with travel outpacing other sectors at 22% CAGR.
But consider this: in the US, 41% of Americans live in states offering mobile driver’s licenses, but only 7% have enrolled (fragmented rollout, interoperability challenges). Or India’s Aadhaar: 1.4 billion enrolled and 150 billion transactions annually, but centralized infrastructure that Europe’s model won’t replicate.
What Europe is attempting is bolder: a decentralized federated identity across 27 sovereign states. Harder coordination and potentially transformative result. And, more relevant to travel’s cross-border reality.
Paris, October: where travel meets European digital identity
APTITUDE (one of the EU’s Large-Scale Pilots for EUDI Wallet) held its kickoff in Paris this October. I was there to onboard the Camino Network into European Digital Identity.
What’s striking about APTITUDE is that travel is central to the pilot scope, not an afterthought. For example our WP4 focuses specifically on ticketing and check-in, and the connection between digital identity and travel is evident to the institutions and legislators shaping these standards: cross-border verification, multi-party coordination, privacy-preserving attributes are exactly what travel demands.
We’re aggregating partners around concrete scenarios, bringing a network of industry relying parties who need this and want to engage. We’re not just implementing, we’re contributing to the standards themselves, including ARF implementation feedback and credential lifecycle specifications.
Our focus: use cases that transform EUDI Wallet into a transactional enabler, linking identity, payment, and travel bookings atomically. What became clear that week is that blockchain is complementary infrastructure for coordination problems that identity verification and the EUDI Wallet framework alone doesn’t solve.
The problem EUDI alone can’t solve
EUDI Wallet lets a traveler prove identity to any accepting service. Progress. But travel isn’t independent identity checks, it’s coordinated flow across parties who need different information at different times.
When you book through a tour operator they often collect documents on your behalf (ID scans, driver’s licenses, accessibility credentials) to enhance the traveler experience, and forward them through the supply chain, with all the GDPR burdens, privacy risks, and data quality issues that come with it. And often, at each touchpoint you present documents again anyway.
With EUDI alone each supplier verifies directly, which is better. But who coordinates which supplier can request which credentials? How does that car rental company in Koh Chang know it’s legitimately part of your booking? How does the tour operator know you’ve checked in?
EUDI provides identity primitives. Travel needs the coordination layer.
What blockchain enables
The coordination problem isn’t new to me; at Sandos and Alpitour I dealt with the same fragmentation, different tools. What I didn’t have was a layer that could work across all parties without point-to-point integrations. That’s the thesis I’ve been testing at Chain4Travel: Camino Network now has Lufthansa, TUI, Alpitour and over 200 companies, and through APTITUDE we’re directly involved in EUDI implementation. This infrastructure provides:
Privacy-preserving credential sharing. Tour operators and OTAs accumulate liability when they collect documents through supply chains. With EUDI they collect minimal data, booking information on-chain defines which sub-suppliers are part of the transaction, and those suppliers request credentials directly from the traveler’s wallet. The wallet verifies legitimacy via EU trust infrastructure while blockchain links requests to booking context.
The key is that selective disclosure is scoped to a specific journey. The wallet shares “Age 25 or older” and “Valid EU driver’s license category B”, not documents or birthdates. Without blockchain linking this to the booking, how does the wallet know that rental company is legitimately part of your trip and not a phishing attempt? Today, you can’t tell a legitimate document request from a phishing email. With booking context on-chain, the wallet can. Security by architecture, not by hoping travelers spot fakes.
Booking state management. Confirmations are static PDFs. Status changes (reserved to checked-in to completed) go untracked. With bookings as blockchain assets, when the hotel updates status upon seeing the traveler at front desk, all authorized parties see the change in real time, which enables downstream logic: on-site service access, or triggering B2B settlement just-in-time when service delivery is confirmed.
The common thread is a shared state layer that multiple parties can read and write with cryptographic guarantees, and act on programmatically. Traditional databases require point-to-point integrations. Blockchain provides one integration for all authorized parties.
The thesis: blockchain serves as coordination layer alongside EUDI’s identity verification, not replacing it but complementing it. There’s architectural alignment here: EUDI represents Europe’s move toward decentralized, user-controlled identity, while blockchain provides decentralized, multi-party state management. The philosophies converge.
And who governs this layer matters. If you wait for big tech platforms to build it you inherit their terms. Camino is consortium-governed, with over 200 travel companies as members and 100+ as validators. Join, and you have voice. This is the same model we brought to our ECB digital euro work: lobbying on behalf of travel toward institutions, bringing industry requirements to the table rather than accepting whatever emerges.
Agnostic infrastructure
Camino Messenger already provides the B2B booking and settlement protocol, and identity verification is the natural extension. The agnosticism we apply to payments extends to identity, across two dimensions.
Geographic. EUDI Wallet will be the European standard, but travelers cross borders. An Italian tourist arrives in Thailand; different systems apply.
The direction, though, is consistent. Aviation is standardizing around ICAO’s Digital Travel Credential. Singapore’s Singpass handles 41 million transactions monthly. India’s Aadhaar serves, well, all India and is now banning hotels from photocopying cards, requiring digital verification via registered apps. Heraklion resort, take note. Brazil built blockchain-based national ID for 214 million citizens. Africa’s Smart Trust Alliance is piloting cross-border infrastructure in Benin, Ghana, and Rwanda, targeting 2030.
We’re building to work across these systems, enabling travel to function regardless of which identity rails a traveler or supplier uses.
Typological. Not all credentials are government-issued. Loyalty program memberships, corporate travel authorizations, student status, professional certifications: travel involves commercial and private credentials alongside institutional ones. The same coordination layer that links EUDI-attested identity to a booking can link it to dynamic hotel loyalty points or live corporate travel policy.
This positions Camino as the coordination layer for a converging stack:
Digital payments. Digital euro and other CBDCs. Qivalis launching. Stablecoins operational on Camino today. Micropayments at scale and near-zero cost. I’ll write more on programmatic payments in travel soon, it’s a topic that deserves its own deep dive.
AI distribution. Agents need verifiable identity to transact on someone’s behalf. Our Agentic Messenger exposes supplier capabilities through MCP protocol, with identity and payment on the same infrastructure.
The blockchain layer coordinating EUDI credentials for a human traveler is the same layer establishing identity for an AI agent. The escrow releasing payment on service confirmation is the same escrow settling an agent-initiated booking.
Honest note
Nothing here is in production. We’re building toward regulatory timelines subject to change, and technical architecture for EUDI + blockchain coordination remains under discussion. Current regulations still require hotels to collect passport data beyond what EUDI’s Person Identification Data provides, and credential types are evolving too.
What we have: operational infrastructure, a consortium that includes major industry players, active participation in EU pilots, and architectural experience from digital euro experimentation. What we’re betting: building now positions travel to implement digital identity on its own terms.
What we’re asking
To travel suppliers and tour operators: the 2027 challenge (accepting EUDI Wallets while coordinating across supply chains) is what we’re working on now. The question isn’t whether to prepare. Do you shape implementation or inherit it? I’d like to talk to those who’d rather lead.
To policymakers and consortia: travel is where digital identity gets stress-tested, the dirty real world where edge cases abound. We’re bringing industry requirements to the table; if you’re exploring similar territory, I’d welcome the conversation.
To technical teams: if you want the architectural details (wallet interaction patterns, credential flows, Messenger protocol integration), reach out. I’m actively bringing parties into APTITUDE, and there’s room for companies and individuals who want to define these standards rather than just adopt them later.
The alternative is waiting for governments to define how travel works, in the vacuum or with big tech. Given the stakes, I’d rather be building.
Let’s talk.
Mik Ruberl has spent 25 years building technology, the last decade at the intersection of travel and tech: CTO at Sandos Hotels & Resorts, Head of Architecture at Alpitour Group, now VP Product at Chain4Travel / Camino Network where he leads work on digital payment and identity infrastructure, and agentic AI for travel distribution.
Technical architectures described here represent work-in-progress within the APTITUDE Large-Scale Pilot.
Originally published on LinkedIn.