EU Digital Travel Application Moves Forward as Council Adopts Negotiating Position

EU member states have taken a concrete step toward a new digital tool for crossing the Union's external borders. On 19 November 2025, the member states' representatives in Coreper approved the Council's negotiating mandate for a regulation that would allow the launch of an EU digital travel application. The proposed rules set out how digital travel credentials can be created on a voluntary basis and how they may be used when people cross an external border.

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A new digital layer for border crossings

The central idea is to let travellers provide their travel data digitally before they reach a border crossing point. With that information shared in advance, border officers could verify travel documents remotely and run checks against border, police and migration databases before a person arrives in line. The Council expects this to shorten waiting times while improving the quality of security checks.

Strengthening the external borders has been a priority for the Danish presidency, which framed the application as one tool among many. Officials stressed that it will not solve every challenge at the border, but that giving border guards better instruments helps them counter crime, security threats and irregular migration. Importantly, the application does not replace physical documents: travellers will still need to carry a valid passport or identity card when crossing an external EU border.

How the application will work

Under the proposal, the digital travel application would be built from three parts: a mobile component in the form of an app, a backend validation service, and a traveller router. All three would be developed by the EU agency eu-LISA according to the functional and technical requirements set out in the regulation.

The mobile component would let both EU citizens and non-EU nationals create digital travel credentials, essentially a digital copy of the data stored on a passport or identity card. Creating and using these credentials would remain optional. The backend service would electronically verify a document's chip to confirm it was issued by a legitimate authority and that the data has not been altered. The traveller router would then allow people to share their credentials with the authorities responsible for border management.

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Linking ETIAS, EES and the EU's travel systems

The Council wants the future application to work closely with the EU's existing border and travel IT systems. Travellers could, for example, use their digital credentials when pre-submitting entry/exit data: the Entry/Exit System became operational in October 2025 and digitally records the entries, exits and biometric data of non-EU nationals. When the ETIAS travel authorisation is rolled out in 2026, non-EU visitors should be able to reuse the credentials from the digital travel application for their ETIAS request, and the same is foreseen for digital visa applications. Our overview of how ETIAS works explains that pre-travel step in plain terms.

With the mandate agreed, the Council presidency is ready to open negotiations with the European Parliament once it has set its own position. The context is sizeable: according to Commission data, 593 million crossings of the EU's external borders were recorded in 2022, a volume that can strain border checks and leave travellers facing long queues.