Pakistan orders smart scanners to end airport baggage hassles

It started with a meeting in Islamabad on a Saturday. Pakistan’s Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif sat down with customs officials and airport authorities, and by the end of it, he’d ordered something travellers have been complaining about for years to change.

No more getting stopped twice for the same bag. No more being pulled aside for questioning that goes nowhere. If you’ve flown in or out of a Pakistani airport recently, you’ll know exactly what that means.

The order: smart baggage scanners, flown in immediately, installed at every international airport in the country, replacing the manual checks that have long frustrated passengers.

Why this matters for Gulf-based Pakistanis

This isn’t a small technical update buried in a government memo. For the large number of Pakistanis living in the UAE, Kuwait and across the Gulf who fly home to see family, baggage clearance has often been the most tiring part of the whole trip.

You land after a long flight, you’re tired, and then you get stuck in a queue because your bag got flagged for a manual search, again. Multiply that by the number of times you’ve made that trip, and it adds up to real frustration.

The prime minister was direct about it. “Passenger convenience and comfort are the top priority, and no one will be allowed to harass passengers,” he said during the meeting, according to officials present.

He told customs authorities plainly that outdated inspection procedures needed to go, replaced by internationally recognised automated screening systems that other major airports already use.

What exactly is changing

Right now, bags passing through Pakistani customs often go through manual inspection, officials physically opening bags, asking questions, sometimes repeating the process even after a passenger has already been checked once.

Under the new directive, smart scanners are supposed to take over that job. Once installed and running, they should let most passengers move through customs without their bags being opened at all, while still letting authorities flag anything that genuinely needs a closer look.

The government hasn’t said when the scanners will actually be up and running, or exactly how officials will handle cases where a manual check is still necessary. That detail matters, and it’s one worth watching before anyone assumes the change has already happened at their local airport.

<p>[EDITOR NOTE: add your own experience of baggage checks or delays at a Pakistani airport, if you have one, here]</p>

It’s not just about scanners

Sharif also went after how staff treat passengers more broadly. He ordered that airport personnel handling other services be trained to international standards, with a clear focus on courtesy and professionalism.

“Courtesy and respect for human dignity in service delivery must be key components of the training,” he said.

That’s a notable thing for a prime minister to say out loud in a government meeting. It suggests the complaints about how passengers get treated at Pakistani airports have reached a level where the top office felt it needed addressing directly, not just the equipment.

Customs isn’t going soft on smuggling

None of this means customs enforcement is being relaxed. In the same meeting, Sharif made clear that authorities still need to stay alert for smuggling, tax evasion and revenue losses.

He praised the Federal Board of Revenue (FBR) and its chairman, Rashid Mahmood Langrial, for rolling out a new customs enforcement system. The newly set-up Indus Collectorate has already carried out 80 enforcement operations in its first three weeks, seizing goods worth roughly Rs205 million.

To back that up, 865 personnel have been deployed across 26 major transit routes to monitor customs activity and clamp down on smuggling. Officials are continuing operations targeting the illegal movement of textiles, vehicles, cigarettes, petroleum products and other goods.

So the message from Islamabad is really two-sided: make life easier for ordinary travellers, while tightening the net around smugglers and tax dodgers. Whether both can happen at once depends a lot on how well the new scanners and the enforcement teams work together on the ground.

What this means if you’re flying soon

If you’ve got a trip to Pakistan booked and you’re flying out of Kuwait, don’t expect an overnight transformation at the airport. There’s no confirmed date yet for when the scanners will be installed or fully operational.

It’s worth keeping an eye on official updates before you travel, especially if you’re the kind of passenger who’s been stopped repeatedly in the past. For now, this is a directive and a plan, not yet a finished rollout.

If you’re checking travel documents before a trip home, it may also be worth looking at wider changes happening at airports generally, from passport-free e-gates being introduced elsewhere to full-body scanners being installed at other international airports, since passenger screening is clearly being upgraded across several countries right now, not just Pakistan.

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