Can AI pull the traveller's details straight off a passport photo instead of my staff typing them in?

Yes, in most cases it can, but treat it as a helper for your staff rather than something you leave completely alone.

The way it works is straightforward. Your customer or your agent uploads a clear photo or scan of the passport page, and the system reads the printed lines at the bottom of that page, which are made to be read by machines. From that it picks up the full name, date of birth, nationality, passport number and expiry date, and fills them into the right boxes on the passenger form. For a family of four travelling together this saves a lot of typing, and more usefully it avoids the small spelling slips that turn into a name correction request with the airline later on.

It is not perfect. A blurred picture, glare from the plastic page, a cropped corner or an older handwritten document can all give a wrong reading, so someone should glance at the filled form before the booking goes out. Names behave differently from one supplier to another too, because some want the name exactly as printed and others split first and middle names their own way. Whether this reading feature is available to you depends on your plan and on what each booking supplier will accept in its passenger fields, so it is worth confirming both before you promise it to a corporate client.

There is also the matter of what happens to the image afterwards, since passport copies are sensitive. Decide who on your team can view them and how long you hold them, and tell your customer why you are asking for the document. A good next step is to test it with a handful of real passports from different countries and see how clean the readings come back, then ask us which document types your plan covers.