Shopping without passport at S.Korea’s Lotte Duty Free

With a smartphone, you can now shop at duty-free shops in Seoul without a passport.

Lotte Duty Free announced on Tuesday that it has introduced the industry's first mobile passport service.

Starting June 20, domestic and foreign members of Lotte Duty Free can conveniently use their mobile passports to enjoy duty-free shopping at the Myeongdong headquarters and Jamsil World Tower stores in Seoul.

The Busan and Jeju stores will introduce the service as soon as they complete the approval process.

The mobile passport can be easily registered by accessing “My Page” within the Lotte Duty Free application. Once registered, it can be used throughout the passport's validity period. 

Earlier, in September last year, the Korea Customs Service announced a plan to allow customers to verify their identity and purchase duty-free goods using smartphone authentication at duty-free shops in the city as part of measures to revitalize the duty-free industry.

Lotte Duty Free proactively collaborated with Lordsystem Co., which holds a patent for digital distributed identification (DID), to develop the system.

Lotte Duty Free said it enhanced security with two-way authentication utilizing an optical character reader (OCR) and an electronic passport integrated circuit (IC) chip.

"We proactively introduced the mobile passport service in response to the government's active support to restore the competitiveness of the Korean duty-free industry," said Kim Joo-nam, CEO of Lotte Duty Free. "We will strive to make it more convenient for customers to enjoy shopping at downtown duty-free stores."

Write to Mi-Kyoung Lee at capital@hankyung.com