An­drea Perez-Sobers

Se­nior Re­porter

an­drea.perez-sobers@guardian.co.tt

Of­fi­cials con­duct­ed a tri­al run of Trinidad and To­ba­go’s new on­line ar­rival and de­par­ture card sys­tem at Pi­ar­co In­ter­na­tion­al Air­port on Sat­ur­day with three Caribbean Air­lines flights, as of­fi­cials pre­pare for its roll­out to­mor­row.
Trav­ellers on flights BW 527 and BW 431 ar­riv­ing at Pi­ar­co, along with pas­sen­gers on out­bound flight BW 240, par­tic­i­pat­ed in the ex­er­cise. The process re­quired them to log on to the Gov­ern­ment’s trav­el por­tal, cre­ate an ac­count us­ing an email ad­dress, up­load a pho­to­graph of the bio­da­ta page of their pass­port, and com­plete the re­quired im­mi­gra­tion and cus­toms de­tails be­fore trav­el.

In a state­ment pro­vid­ed to Guardian Me­dia yes­ter­day, CAL re­port­ed that the elec­tron­ic card sys­tem was well-re­ceived by cus­tomers dur­ing the tri­al. Pas­sen­gers un­fa­mil­iar with the plat­form re­ceived as­sis­tance from the air­line’s cus­tomer ser­vice rep­re­sen­ta­tives sta­tioned at the air­port. Those rep­re­sen­ta­tives will re­main avail­able to as­sist trav­ellers when the sys­tem be­comes ful­ly op­er­a­tional.
The air­line in­di­cat­ed that no ma­jor is­sues emerged dur­ing the ex­er­cise, and prepa­ra­tions re­main on track for the im­ple­men­ta­tion to­mor­row.

Guardian Me­dia al­so con­tact­ed a Min­istry of Home­land Se­cu­ri­ty of­fi­cial who is over­see­ing the dig­i­tal plat­form. How­ev­er, the of­fi­cial con­firmed they were aware of some mi­nor tech­ni­cal con­cerns raised by trav­ellers dur­ing test­ing, adding work is un­der­way to re­solve them be­fore the of­fi­cial launch.

The dig­i­tal im­mi­gra­tion sys­tem forms part of a broad­er ef­fort to mod­ernise bor­der pro­cess­ing and re­duce the need for pa­per forms tra­di­tion­al­ly dis­trib­uted to trav­ellers on in­bound flights.
Un­der the new sys­tem, pas­sen­gers will com­plete the ar­rival or de­par­ture form on­line be­fore reach­ing the im­mi­gra­tion hall, al­low­ing bor­der of­fi­cials to ac­cess the in­for­ma­tion elec­tron­i­cal­ly. The move is ex­pect­ed to re­duce pro­cess­ing times and stream­line the ar­rival ex­pe­ri­ence at the coun­try’s main in­ter­na­tion­al gate­way.

Roger Alexan­der, Min­is­ter of Home­land Se­cu­ri­ty, pre­vi­ous­ly ac­knowl­edged that ini­tial chal­lenges could arise dur­ing the ear­ly phase of the tran­si­tion, not­ing that ad­just­ments would be made as the sys­tem be­comes ful­ly in­te­grat­ed in­to bor­der op­er­a­tions.
Maria Fer­nan­des, who trav­elled on flight BW 527, yes­ter­day de­scribed the process as straight­for­ward once the in­struc­tions were fol­lowed.

“I just logged in, up­loaded the pass­port page, and filled out the de­tails. It was clear and easy to un­der­stand.”

An­oth­er BW 527 pas­sen­ger, Kevin Ali, said the steps were man­age­able and took on­ly a few min­utes to com­plete.

“Every­thing was laid out step by step, so it didn’t take long to get through.”

How­ev­er, Sharon Bap­tiste, who ar­rived on flight BW 431, en­coun­tered some dif­fi­cul­ty nav­i­gat­ing the plat­form.

“It wasn’t that easy for me at first. I had to ask for help be­cause I wasn’t fa­mil­iar with the process, but once some­one showed me where to go, it be­came clear­er.”

Grena­da re­cent­ly in­tro­duced its own On­line Em­barka­tion/Dis­em­barka­tion Card plat­form, which went live on March 2. Trav­ellers en­ter­ing that coun­try now com­plete their im­mi­gra­tion form on­line be­fore ar­rival, elim­i­nat­ing the need for pa­per doc­u­ments.