The General Directorate of Residency and Foreigners Affairs-Dubai, GDRFA-Dubai, is soon to launch the "Smart Gate", a quick and easy alternative to the standard manual passport control counters and e-gates, across the emirate's airports.

Major General Mohammed Ahmed Al Marri, GDRFA-Dubai Director-Genral, said that the new gate, "Enables each passenger to pass through immigration without assistance or travel document or ID and within only 10 seconds".

The announcement came as part of the initiatives unveiled by the department at Dubai International Government Achievements Exhibition, DIGAE, organised at Dubai World Trade Centre, DWTC, from April 9th to 11th.

"The new system has successfully underwent the experimental stage and we are planning to put it into action by the end of this May," Al Marri said.

Unlike the e-gate, which requires an e-gate card, the smart gate does not require a dedicated card. It can identify a traveller by either their passport, Emirates ID, e-gate card or QR barcode generated via the GDRFA smartphone app.

"It is seven seconds faster than the e-gate when processing a passenger’s credentials and provide the quickest way through passport control," he said.

The Smart Gate is part of our contributions for Dubai Future Accelerators for serving passengers and it is the first-of-its-kind worldwide, he said.

The in place e-gates across the immigration checkpoints served more than 6,500 million inbound passengers from January to March 2018 and more than 6,800 outbound passengers during the same period, more than 13,500 million in total, he said.