At the WION Iconic Tourism Summit, Mr Vinay Malhotra, Head – Strategic Global Partnerships, VFS Global, spoke on AI, smarter visa processing and why technology must make travel simpler, not more complicated.
The future of travel may be powered by artificial intelligence, but for Vinay Malhotra, Head – Strategic Global Partnerships, VFS Global, the real measure of technology is far simpler: does it make the traveller’s journey easier?
Speaking at the WION Iconic Tourism Summit in New Delhi during the panel discussion ‘Tech Frontiers Reshaping the Journey’, Malhotra offered a practical view of AI’s growing role in global mobility. Rather than presenting technology as a replacement for people, he spoke about how it can take care of repetitive, complex and time-consuming tasks while allowing human expertise to remain at the centre of the journey.
“Technology is great when you can take away some steps,” he said during the discussion. “But if, in the process of technology, you end up making life difficult for the customer, it’s no way.”
That philosophy is particularly relevant to the visa process, where travellers routinely deal with extensive documentation, appointments, biometrics and multiple stages before they can begin their journey.
AI that can read between the documents
Malhotra pointed to VFS Global’s Intelligent Document Processing (IDP) system as one example of how AI is being applied to the visa ecosystem.
The system is designed to help process large volumes of supporting documentation and identify inconsistencies or anomalies. For travellers, the significance is easy to understand: visa applications can involve everything from passports and flight details to insurance documents and lengthy financial statements.
Bank statements, in particular, can run into hundreds of pages. Malhotra explained that AI can help identify discrepancies that might otherwise be difficult to detect manually, including unusual changes in financial information.
The larger purpose, however, goes beyond speed. AI is increasingly being used to strengthen document checks, identify possible fraud and improve consistency, while the actual visa decision remains with the relevant government authority.
VFS Global has also been expanding its responsible-AI capabilities. Its current IDP platform is described as providing structured, fact-based summaries for visa officers while retaining human oversight.
For Malhotra, this is where the technology conversation becomes particularly important. AI should not remove the human layer from travel; it should allow humans to concentrate on the situations where judgement matters.
Bringing the visa centre to the traveller
Perhaps the most tangible example of this approach is Visa At Your Doorstep, or VAD.
Instead of asking applicants to travel to a visa centre, the service brings the application process to their home, office, hotel or another convenient location. The mobile setup can facilitate document submission and biometric enrolment, making it particularly useful for families, corporate groups, medical travellers and people living away from major cities.
At the summit, Malhotra said that 20 governments in India currently subscribe to the facility, with the end-to-end process taking about 30 minutes on the spot.
“For those who prefer that the visa centre comes to you, we coined the term VAD, or Visa at Your Doorstep,” he explained.
The service reflects a broader change in how visa applications are being approached. The visa centre no longer necessarily has to be a physical destination that the applicant must reach. Increasingly, the service can travel with the applicant.
That shift is particularly relevant as international mobility expands beyond traditional metropolitan travellers. Convenience, in this context, becomes part of the infrastructure of travel.
From queues to connected journeys
Malhotra also pointed to the wider transformation taking place at borders and airports.
India’s DigiYatra system, for instance, has crossed 10 crore successful journeys across 38 airports, illustrating how quickly digital identity and facial-recognition technology are becoming part of the passenger experience.
Similarly, the Government of India’s Fast Track Immigration – Trusted Traveller Programme uses automated e-gates and biometric authentication to accelerate immigration clearance for eligible travellers.
For Malhotra, these developments represent a fundamental change in the way people move through airports.
He recalled the experience of arriving at major international airports and finding long immigration queues, while eligible trusted travellers move through automated systems. Technology, he suggested, is beginning to change that equation.
He also offered a glimpse of where the airport experience could go next: navigation systems that do more than simply tell passengers where their gate is. Imagine an airport journey where technology guides a passenger turn by turn, calculates walking time and even provides relevant information about services along the way.
The important distinction is that this technology should remain useful rather than intrusive.
The human being still matters
For all the enthusiasm around AI, Malhotra’s central message was not about replacing people.
It was about using technology intelligently.
“The role of humans, the role of travel partners, is more relevant today with technology, not less,” he said. “It is only how we use it and we focus on the customer and let the technology do the simple tasks.”
That distinction could become increasingly important as travellers interact with chatbots, automated systems and AI-powered customer service.
A digital system may be perfectly capable of answering a routine question. But travel rarely remains routine. A missed connection, a visa complication, a medical emergency or an unusual documentation problem can quickly turn a predictable journey into an exception.
And exceptions, Malhotra suggested, are where humans still matter most.
Technology should therefore automate the predictable and allow people to deal with the unpredictable.
The next frontier: less friction
VFS Global has been investing heavily in technology, with the company reporting annual technology investment of more than US$100 million. Its recent AI initiatives include intelligent document processing and multilingual AI-powered customer support.
But the most interesting part of Malhotra’s intervention was not the scale of the technology. It was the simplicity of the objective.
Travel is made up of dozens of individual interactions, visas, documentation, bookings, check-ins, security, immigration, airport navigation and customer support. Each may be manageable on its own, but together they can create friction.
The real opportunity for AI is to connect these pieces without making the traveller learn a new system at every stage.
As Malhotra put it, technology works when it removes steps rather than creating them.
That may ultimately be the most useful test for the AI-powered travel industry. Not how sophisticated the technology looks, but whether the person carrying the passport notices it at all.
If it works well, the traveller should simply feel that the journey has become easier.
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