Effective and secure border management is critical for governments to ensure 'homeland security' while rapidly processing cross-border travelers. An effective border management system needs to identify:

• The small percentage of passengers who do not have proper travel documents or visas
• The still smaller percentage who are illegal immigrants, drug traffickers, other criminals or potential terrorists

Passenger information resides in many places and formats, but border authorities need it in a single, consistent format.

iBorders API - PNR is a post-departure system which collates passenger and flight data from a number of sources (typically airline reservations and departure control systems) and provides this data to control authorities in a single format prior to flight arrival.

Advance Passenger Information (API)

Advance Passenger Information (API) involves the capture of a passenger's biographic data contained in his or her passport. It is combined with details of the passenger's itinerary - for example, the flight and seat number - and then collated and transmitted in the form of batch flight manifests to border control agencies in the destination country after aircraft departure.

API is increasingly required by border control agencies around the world. It has the potential to reduce considerably the delay and inconvenience by passengers at pre-flight screening. In Europe, API is tightly coupled with EU Council Directive 2004/82/EC, commonly referred to as the 'Spanish Directive'. Carriers have generally built their API solutions to comply with this directive, as well as the relevant legislation of other destination countries.

Passenger Name Record (PNR)

Passenger Name Record (PNR) is the complete set of booking data captured by airlines or their representatives - travel agents, GDSs, etc. A PNR contains the travel record of a passenger or a group of passengers travelling together. This includes:

• Ticket and itinerary data
• Frequent flyer numbers
• Special request information
• Payment information

Border management agencies use this 'rich' information to perform sophisticated risk assesmments, including link analysis and data matching, to identify high-risk travellers.

Traditionally, the analysis of PNRs has been performed post-departure, often for 'after the fact' crime investigations and forensics. Increasingly, however, government agencies are requesting this data in advance of travel in order to take action before a passenger arrives in country.

Legislation has been established in many countries to limit a government's access to PNR data to certain fields of information. Accordingly, SITA has developed our iBorders PNR Push/Filter service to filter out sensitive data fields and transmit ('push') only the data allowed by a particular government.