Passport Bank - Business Plan

Ever being paranoid about losing your passport while travelling abroad? This idea came to me while I was recently at the Rome airport checking in my luggage and a hassled passenger jumped in front of me, breaking the line to my annoyance. The agent smiled at him and gave him his and his family’s passport. Apparently, they had lost their passport a couple of days ago. The relief on his face was so obvious that it left me wondering.

Chew on this:
• You use your passport to enter a country and have to stay there for a few days before returning back to your country or visiting another one.
• Rather than carrying your passport and risk losing it, you deposit it to a ‘passport bank’ after immigration, before leaving the airport.
• The passport bank makes a copy of your passport and your finger print and stamps the copy as valid – one that you retain to use at hotels and other occasions.
• You travel freely for these days – even if you lose your copy, you can come back to this office validate your finger print and get another copy, while your original passport is safe.
• While leaving the country, you can collect your passport after paying the fee.
• A reasonable fee may be equivalent to a dollar a day, with a minimum of $5.

Now the business proposition:

There were approximately 840 million international travelers in 2006 according to World Tourism Organization (UNWTO). Out of this, 45% are air travelers and 7% are thru sea. For this exercise, we will consider these lots only since these are legitimate travelers. Out of these, close to one-third could be travelers not required to carry a passport and half of these could be discounted as same traveler doing a to-fro journey. That leaves us with 210m travelers. Assuming only a fourth of these use the service, we are talking approximately 50m travelers. If these people travel twice a year, five days per tour, on an average, we are talking about revenue of half a billion US dollars. If we have this service in about 1000 locations/airports around the world (most touristy/travelled) and cost of managing each location is 30000 dollars per month on an average, then the annual cost of the service is $360 million.

The success of this can depend on how trustworthy or reputed the institution is. A good bet could be a reputed bank, a credit card service or an airline. All it requires is a small, but well guarded office at most air and sea ports around the world. If an airline opens it, they can use their existing space. Most processes could be automated to save further on costs.

I understand that there are lots of assumptions in this back of the envelope plan. For example 50million travelers may be a high estimate – perhaps, but 50m by the third year of operation is not unconceivable. What about trust? A credit card company may score well here given that they already have a lot of your information anyway. Security? Yes, but then it is probably safer there than with the traveler. There could be more concerns. However one thing is very clear that there is a need, which means that logistics and math can be helped by technology to make this a business success. Buyers anyone?