PNRSSR DOCS & APIS: the passport data airlines require
For most international flights, an airline must hold passport details before departure. Here's what that requirement is, how the DOCS entry encodes a passport, and what each field means.
What APIS is
Advance Passenger Information System (APIS) is the framework by which airlines transmit passenger identity and travel-document data to the authorities of the countries being flown to or from, before the aircraft departs. It exists for border security and immigration pre-clearance. In practical terms, for a booking to be "document-complete" the airline needs the traveller's passport details attached to the PNR — and if they are missing, the passenger can be stopped at check-in.
How the data is stored: the SSR DOCS entry
Passport details live in the PNR as a Special Service Request of type DOCS. It is a single structured line, and the fields are separated by slashes in a fixed order. A typical entry looks like this:
Reading the slash-separated fields in order:
| Field | Meaning |
|---|---|
| P | Document type — P for passport |
| GBR | Issuing country (ISO 3-letter code) |
| 999237144 | Passport number |
| GBR | Nationality |
| 18SEP99 | Date of birth |
| F | Sex — M / F / X |
| 13MAR27 | Passport expiry date |
| TEST | Surname |
| ANGELA ZOE | Given name(s) |
| P1 | Passenger association — links the data to passenger 1 |
Where the data comes from: the MRZ
Every one of those fields already exists, in a standard machine-readable form, at the bottom of the passport's photo page — the two-line Machine-Readable Zone (MRZ) defined by ICAO Doc 9303. The MRZ is a checksum-protected encoding of the document number, nationality, date of birth, sex, expiry and name. Because it carries its own check digits, the data can be validated mathematically — a strong signal that it was read correctly. That is exactly what the PNRpro passport tool does: it reads the MRZ and builds the DOCS entry for you, in the format your host system expects.
Three systems, three formats
The same passport produces three slightly different entries depending on the GDS. The fields are identical; the prefix and passenger-association syntax differ:
- Amadeus:
SR DOCS …/P1 - Galileo / Travelport:
SI.SSR DOCS …/P1 - Sabre:
3DOCS …-1.1
A note on privacy
Passport data is sensitive. A tool that reads it should do so on your own device, without uploading the image or the extracted fields anywhere — which is how the PNRpro passport reader is built. Nothing is sent to a server; the reading happens entirely in your browser.
Open the passport tool →