Sad news for nostalgic travelers — the days of admiring new stamps in your passport are almost at an end. Many countries are moving away from passport stamps in favor of digital alternatives that are more secure and efficient, experts say.
The move is already happening in some countries, so you may have even seen this during your international travels, but it will happen in more airports across the world in the coming months and years.
“I think the biggest thing to point out is that passport stamps really came into their own in the era of the 1950s and ’60s when travel really was made more accessible for people — air travel, specifically,” said Katy Nastro, a spokesperson and travel expert at Going.
In the years to come, more and more people were crossing borders to visit destinations outside of their home country.
“And then you come into the ’80s and ’90s and we saw specific precautions of certain ink to be used that couldn’t be replicated and specific distinctive symbols and marks and machine-readable text in the early 2000s,” Nastro added.
