Andy R.

Which airlines have hired ICTS or other companies to do security checks (put a sticker on back of passport)? I know American Airlines, Delta, United, and Virgin Atlantic does. Does KLM, Air France, Emirates, Qatar, British Airways, Etihad, Swiss Air, Turkish Airlines , Air Canada or Luftansa do it? I am planning a trip and I want to know which of these do and which of these don't.

Mats

Andy R.,
I've tried to Google and find an answer to your question, but no such luck. The Israeli carriers, of course, have their procedures at every airport. And Israeli airports have the same security system for all airlines.

The problem is that ICTS and its subsidiaries serve a variety of functions. In some airports, like Amsterdam, ICTS handles the entire security checkpoint. So it's a different task than interviews or person/baggage screening.

I've also seen passport stickers that resemble ICTS, but that might indicate some level of screening, not the same as what is conducted for US carriers.

The data points I have are:
1. When Securicor handled the contract for Paris/CDG 2E, the procedure was the same if you were on a US-bound flight on a US carrier (Delta or Northwest) or on an Air France flight to Israel. Passengers on Air France flights to US destinations still had random frisking and bag inspections at the gate, but none of the interviews.

2. Turkish Airlines has a contract security agent for US and Israel flights. Israel passengers get a few questions, and some undergo personal and baggage searches. I think that all USA passengers are frisked and swabbed for explosives.

British Airways--I think--swabs and frisks everyone at Istanbul.

3. For flights to Tel Aviv, Air Canada swabs every person and their hand luggage but there are no questions. Delta and US Airways have walk-through metal detectors and x-ray machines; United has hand wands and visual inspection. No questions.

But it gets a bit more complicated:

Companies like ICTS have different procedures at different airports, even for different airlines at the same airport. Sometimes there are questions, sometimes not. Sometimes everyone gets frisked; sometimes they choose at random. Some have a selectee list, others don't. So the presence of an ICTS or ICTS group security firm doesn't predict what a passenger might expect.

Although they have document checks in Europe, I have never seen passengers questioned or searched when flying Lufthansa or Air Canada from Europe. British Airways has random inspections at the gate (the boarding card reader beeps).

I hope that helps.

STBCypriot

I've never received an ICTS sticker on my passport flying Etihad out of AUH to JFK or LAX. Have never received a sticker from Etihad flying into AUH from either JFK or LCA.

poisson

I think it's best to fly with a foreign carrier to avoid these dumb ICTS guys.

skunker

I have a sticker from Etihad, but I've only flown them to AUH, not from.

cargueiro

There are many companies doing these services of ICTS. At CDG you will probably only encounter ICTS but there are many other companies around the world providing similar services. Some are owned by ICTS, some are partnered with ICTS and some are competition to ICTS.

When it comes to stickers, these may or may not be used according to practices developed for that airline in that station. With stickkers, these ICTS type companies generally are looking to prevent inadmisssable pax from boarding aircraft. I won't say more than that as pax need know no more as to why they are used...

Just peel the sticker off once in the air. Is that so hard? And be polite to these guys! They are actually reducing your airfare by reducing inadmissable fines to the carrier you are flying on... They do ask the same questions to almost everone but there is a reason why they do...

poisson

What type of people are they looking for in particular?

If I am en route to the US and I have a US passport, why am I even required to answer any questions?

SeriouslyLost

Because they will screw with you otherwise. At LHR at least, they are perfectly happy to lie, try to threaten, and generally harass you if you don't play their game. If you do mess them about they summon the actual law, which just ruins everyone's day.

Personally I find ICTS worse (once they've decided to be dicks) than TSA because at least with TSA there is some vague hope of accountability.

FateSucks

They will not admit it, but they are looking at solo travelers, especially if you are male and have a Mediterranean, Middle Eastern, or Indian/.... appearance.

I got this treatment all the time despite me not being Middle Eastern or Indian/.........they thought I was from the Levant (Israel or Lebanon)....morons.

So I stop flying with US airlines and flew with foreign based airlines instead to avoid them.

In the West Coast, I hardly get this racial profile due to it being way more diverse and they assume I was part Hawaiian or East/Southeast Asian instead...hilarious...but more tolerable.

groundops

ICTS clients include Air Canada, Air France, All Nippon Airways, American Airlines, British Airways, China Airlines, Delta Air Lines, EasyJet, Emirates, Japan Airlines, KLM, Lufthansa, Qantas, Singapore Airlines, South African Airways, United Airlines and US Airways.

See: http://www.ictseurope.com/clients

If you look at local sites such as http://www.icts.co.uk you will see they have further clients such as Aer Lingus and Virgin Atlantic too.

To avoid ICTS, you are best avoiding airports where they operate! But they operate at a lot of them - not just the ones at the main site. In UK and Ireland, the local site shows they are at Manchester, Newcastle, Belfast, Birmingham and Shannon (as well as LHR and LGW as listed on main site).

FateSucks

I was on a flight on Air France from CDG in 2013 and Japan Airlines from NRT in 2014 and not once did a ICTS agent stopped and questioned me like they do with US airlines. The latter questions me more about personal things like my ethnicity.

Either Air France and Japan Airlines do it fairly/randomly or only target people who acted suspiciously. Not normal people like me.

lonelycrowd

+1, and not just with ICTS. Recently pushed back a little with TK's contractor (Gozen) on a question about place of residence that didn't seem relevant to my right to fly RT IST-LHR on a US passport and Turkish residence card. I just asked the girl at the podium (really young, hard to believe she was even old enough to be a college grad) if there was any particular reason for her question and the next thing I knew she hissed, said "you son of a b*tch" and called over some of her colleagues to escort me to a table for a secondary security inspection. No idea what caused such a venomous reaction on her part - in hindsight it's possible that her English was so bad that she thought she heard me use less polite language than I actually did... I asked repeatedly what criteria they used and each time they either said "random" or that they didn't understand my English. To make it even more patronizing their search was so basic that it didn't enhance safety in any way over the main checkpoint - they didn't even use a puffer or a wand, which they commonly use at the gate on shorter-distance LH flights out of IST, nor did they rummage through my suitcase after making a big deal about me having to be the one to open it.

I'm not saying that the process would have been more pleasant with the Turkish National Police or the airport authority's security guards there, but it wouldn't have felt like the same airline that takes my money and gives me gold status is intentionally trying to piss me off. The TSA may be incompetent, but I find it much easier to accept the SSSS treatment when it's being done by a, well, quasi-LEO executing the (however pointless and misguided) mandates of DHS and its overseas equivalents than a private security firm that earns a profit regardless of how petty and retaliatory its employees are. In that sense, the incident described above actually made me a little teeny tiny bit appreciative of the TSA and quite wary of free-market conservatives who want to privatize it (and, in all likelihood, hand our airports over to the likes of multinationals such as ICTS, Group 4, Securitas, ect... - some of which have been accused of very questionable human rights practices in other lines of business).

PAN12

hi .. what significance do the colours of the ICTS security stickers have ? Mine seem to be mainly green, purple and white with a yellow, black and red one in there too ! thanks

SDQBound

Every day has a random color, that way the security personnel at the gate can tell if you went through security at the check-in desk/lounge. If they notice that you have two stickers with the same color, they check the date.

GUWonder

That's indeed the explanation (albeit I wouldn't use the word random) for most of the ICTS stickers placed on the passports for flights to at least the US.