My Experience Using Australia’s Digital Arrival Card

The Australian government launched the Australia Travel Declaration (ATD) in 2024. It’s a digital replacement for the paper incoming passenger card.

Initially only available on a trial basis for selected Qantas trans-Tasman flights to Brisbane, the pilot program has since expanded. It now covers:

• All Qantas international flights into Brisbane
• Selected Qantas international flights into Sydney (mainly afternoon/evening arrivals, including from New Zealand, Johannesburg, Santiago, Honolulu and Tokyo)

It’s now well over a year since the Australia Travel Declaration pilot began. Somehow it’s still very much in the trial phase. These things invariably take time, and there are still some issues to be ironed out. But I’m pleased to say that my own experience using the ATD when flying into Brisbane this month was seamless.

How the Australia Travel Declaration works in practice

I tested out the Australia Travel Declaration when flying from the Solomon Islands to Brisbane earlier this month.

If you’re booked on a Qantas flight that’s eligible to use the Australia Travel Declaration, you’ll get a notification in the Qantas App within 72 hours of departure. At this stage, the ATD is only available within the Qantas App. Australian Border Force eventually plans to roll out a digital arrival form on its own platforms.

When you open up the ATD form in the Qantas App, some basic information like your name will already be pre-filled.

You’ll still need to enter most of the same information that’s collected on the paper incoming passenger card. But overall, it took me less time to fill out the digital declaration than the yellow card we’ve become accustomed to completing on the plane.

After completing the form, the Qantas App generated a QR code which I scanned when I got to the front of the queue for customs. In my case, this worked seamlessly. I was out of Brisbane Airport within a few minutes of collecting my checked luggage.

There are still some teething problems

While the ATD worked well for me in Brisbane, at least one AFF member found that this wasn’t the case when arriving recently at Sydney Airport. This member wrote on our forum:

Tried it in SYD the other week, terrible. Airport was really busy and they had set up a nothing to declare exit, but were only accepting paper forms. Anyone with digital got sent to the main exit which had become the something to declare exit and the queues were long. Most of our flight had digital (QF104) and there were many angry pax.

justinbrett on the AFF forum

Lessons learned

While the ATD rollout is taking a long time, at least the government is properly testing it this time before rolling it out to all passengers arriving in Australia.

It seems the government has learnt its lesson after the botched Digital Passenger Declaration (DPD) rollout in 2022. Completing a DPD became a mandatory requirement to board an international flight to Australia for several months in 2022, but many people could not actually complete it.

A key difference with the new ATD is that it’s simply available as an alternative option for people who don’t want to fill out the paper form. The paper form is still available as a backup option.

New Zealand implemented a similar online declaration system in 2023, which seems to have been successful.

Around the world, many other countries have also ditched paper arrival cards in favour of digital declarations (or, in many cases, never required them in the first place).