You’ve checked in and got your boarding pass; you sit in the waiting area for what seems like ages to board your plane and while you’re there, you put your boarding pass somewhere safe; you walk around, you get a drink, the kids are running around, you talk to fellow passengers, and then you hear the announcement that the plane is ready to board! You gather all your hand luggage/belongings together and go to get your boarding pass out reading to be scanned… but you can’t find it! So, you unpack everything, check all your pockets and in most cases, you find it; a little crumpled maybe, but it’s there. In some cases, it doesn’t get found, but that’s another story.
But Etihad Airways has found a way to cut out the manic searching of the boarding pass by announcing that they are introducing mobile boarding passes for passengers flying from Heathrow and Manchester. The new system will increase the number of options at check-in, allow passengers to store more than one boarding person on a mobile device, reduce the wastage of paper and, of course, eliminate the risk of the lost boarding pass!
Mobile boarding passes will include all the boarding information the current paper versions have – passenger name, flight number, seat number, gate number and the barcode which is scanned by an electronic reader as passengers pass through the departure gate. These passes can be sent directly to passengers’ smartphones, via the Passbook feature on iOS operated mobile devices, or they can be sent to an email address.
This new facility is now available for passengers that are travelling from Heathrow, Manchester, and at a series of international airports including Dusseldorf, Sao Paulo, Munich, Tokyo, Frankfurt, Abu Dhabi, Doha and Istanbul.
Of course, lose your smartphone or that email and you’ve still lost your boarding pass… but we won’t go into that story!
By Oliver Derek