Your booking confirmation is one of the most personal documents you own. It pairs your full name with your passport details, your credit card, your home address, the dates your house will be empty, and — increasingly — the seat you like, the allergies you have, and the people you travel with. Now imagine all of that travelling across the internet protected by encryption that, in a decade or so, may not protect anything at all. That is the slightly uncomfortable conversation the travel industry is starting to have, and it is the reason "post-quantum" is creeping out of academic papers and into the procurement checklists of hotel chains, airlines and booking platforms.
What "post-quantum" actually means, in plain English
Most of the encryption that keeps the modern web safe — the little padlock in your browser, the secure tunnel between your phone and a hotel's booking system, the signatures on software updates — relies on a small handful of mathematical problems that classical computers find genuinely hard. Factoring enormous numbers, for example, or solving certain equations on elliptic curves. Hard, in this context, means "would take longer than the age of the universe to crack with brute force."
Quantum computers do not play by the same rules. A sufficiently powerful quantum machine running an algorithm called Shor's algorithm could, in theory, chew through those problems in a useful amount of time. Nobody has built that machine yet. Plenty of serious people are trying. The U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has spent years running a global competition to standardise new "post-quantum" algorithms — encryption that is designed to stay safe even if a large quantum computer eventually shows up. The first standards have now been published, and governments are quietly setting deadlines for migration.
None of this is science fiction. It is just infrastructure planning, the same way Y2K was infrastructure planning. The difference is that Y2K had a date on the calendar. The quantum transition has a date that nobody has written down yet.
Why travel data is unusually exposed
Booking platforms are an interesting target for a very specific reason: the data has a long shelf life. A leaked password can be rotated in a minute. A leaked passport number is awkward for a decade. A leaked travel pattern — where you go, when, with whom — can be valuable to an adversary years after the trip itself.
That long shelf life is what makes the so-called "harvest now, decrypt later" threat real. The idea is straightforward and a little unsettling: an attacker does not need a quantum computer today. They just need to capture encrypted traffic today, sit on it, and decrypt it whenever the technology catches up. Anything sensitive that travels over the wire now — biometric scans at check-in, payment tokens, loyalty data, corporate travel itineraries for executives — could in principle be opened in the future like a time capsule.
For most consumer apps, that is an abstract worry. For travel, where the data identifies real human beings in real physical locations, it is a little more concrete.
Where booking platforms are quietly vulnerable
If you sketch the journey of a single hotel booking, the encryption surface is enormous:
- The connection between your browser or app and the booking platform.
- The connection between the platform and the global distribution systems that route inventory.
- The connection between the platform and the hotel's property management system.
- Payment processing, which fans out across acquirers, networks and issuers.
- Identity checks — passport scans, age verification, sometimes biometrics.
- Internal back-ups, audit logs, fraud-detection pipelines and email confirmations.
Every one of those hops uses cryptography. Every one of them is, today, signed and sealed using algorithms that a future quantum computer could in principle undo. A truly secure travel platform — the phrase is doing a lot of work here — has to think about all of them, not just the front door.
ESG is not just carbon: cybersecurity is part of the "S" and the "G"
The conversation about responsible travel has, understandably, been dominated by carbon. But environmental, social and governance reporting frameworks — the alphabet soup that listed companies and increasingly their suppliers have to comply with — are explicit about something travellers rarely think about: data protection and resilience are governance issues. A breach is not just a regulatory problem; it is an ESG problem.
That matters for booking platforms because corporate travel buyers, in particular, are starting to ask questions that look a lot like ESG cybersecurity questions. How is data encrypted in transit and at rest? What is your roadmap for migrating to NIST-approved post-quantum algorithms? How do you handle key rotation? Where are your back-ups, and under whose jurisdiction? "We use industry-standard TLS" is becoming the answer that quietly loses tenders, in the same way that "we offset our carbon" is becoming the answer that quietly loses sustainability questionnaires.
In other words, the platforms that take this seriously now will be the platforms that look credible to corporate clients, regulators and, eventually, ordinary travellers in five or ten years.
What a post-quantum migration actually looks like
It is rarely a single dramatic upgrade. The serious work is unglamorous and goes something like this:
- Inventory. Every place cryptography is used has to be catalogued. This sounds trivial. It is not. Most platforms find dependencies they had forgotten about.
- Crypto-agility. Systems are refactored so the underlying algorithm can be swapped without rewriting the application. Today's TLS, tomorrow's hybrid scheme, the day after that's pure post-quantum standard.
- Hybrid deployments. For a transition period, traffic is protected by both a classical and a post-quantum algorithm at once. If one is broken, the other still holds.
- Long-lived data first. Anything stored for years — identity documents, contracts, audit logs — gets re-encrypted under post-quantum keys earlier than ephemeral session traffic, because it is most exposed to "harvest now, decrypt later."
- Supplier audits. Booking platforms do not exist alone. Hotels, payment processors, and identity providers all have to migrate too. The weakest link sets the ceiling.
None of this is exciting on a marketing slide. It is, however, the difference between a secure travel platform and one that simply hopes nobody is paying attention.
The quiet upside for travellers
If the industry does this well, travellers will notice almost nothing. That is the goal. You will scan your passport, you will tap your card, you will receive your booking confirmation, and a much more durable layer of mathematics will be sitting under the experience.
If the industry does this badly, travellers will notice a lot. Not in a single dramatic event, but as a slow drip of breaches involving older datasets that were captured years before. The travellers most exposed will be the ones who travel most: frequent flyers, business travellers, public figures, and anyone whose movements are commercially or politically interesting.
That is why "post-quantum" deserves a place in the same sentence as carbon, water, and labour conditions when we talk about responsible travel. It is part of taking the duty of care to guests seriously.
What to ask your booking platform now
You do not need a cryptography degree to be a useful customer. A few questions go a long way:
- Do you have a published roadmap for migrating to NIST post-quantum standards?
- How long do you retain identity documents and payment data, and how are they encrypted at rest?
- Do you require your hotel and payment partners to meet a minimum cryptographic standard?
- How is my loyalty balance — points, credits, tokens — protected if my account is compromised?
- What is your incident-response process, and how quickly will I be told?
A platform that can answer these in plain English is, almost by definition, a platform that has thought about them.
How this fits with what we are building at IMPT
IMPT exists to make travel and shopping that is good for the planet feel as easy as the alternative. That mission is not just about the carbon offset attached to every hotel booking, or the climate-positive purchases through our partner brands, or the IMPT Card and IMPT Token that tie the loyalty layer together. It is also about being a platform you can trust with the rest of it: your name, your card, your itinerary, your data. As post-quantum standards mature and the industry begins its long migration, our intention is straightforward — to keep the carbon honest, the booking simple, and the cryptography boring, in the best possible sense of the word.