Over the last several months, I’ve read with interest articles about airlines such as Continental and Delta starting to allow digital boarding passes on your iPhone or other cell phone. (The photo on the right is from this post on Engadget.) One of the things that I love about my iPhone it that it allows me to keep all of the information that is important to me in one place, replacing the countless pieces of paper that I am likely to misplace. So moving my boarding pass from a piece of paper to my iPhone is just another step in my attempt to reduce the paper in my life.
While I have seen a few articles about digital boarding passes, I haven’t come across many first-hand accounts about how it works in practice, with the exception of this one post by Grant Martin a few weeks ago on the Gadling travel website. Martin describes how he was able to use his iPhone as his boarding pass. It is worth reading his entire post to get the full story, but he ends it as follows:
fairly useful some day when I’m in a hurry on the way to the airport.
The small drawbacks I can foresee, which largely have to do with phone
battery life, can be planned around, and in the worst scenario you can
always get a paper copy. Once the TSA and airline staff are all up to
speed on procedure, I think that the technology will really gain
traction.
The reason for my post is that I am curious to hear from others who have used a digital boarding pass on their iPhone at one of the few airports that allows them to learn about how the process has worked in practice. Except for that one post from Grant Martin, I haven’t come across much more on the Internet, even on FlyerTalk which is usually one of the best places to get advice and stories from frequent flyers. Here is a story about someone using a PDF version of his boarding pass on his iPhone with success, which is not the same thing but is certainly related.
A lot of you will, like me, be traveling over the next few weeks for the holidays. If you have the opportunity to use your iPhone as your boarding pass, I would love for you to share your experiences. Post a comment or send me an e-mail.
I’ve tried that boarding pass trick twice. It worked outgoing in Newark, but not coming back in Syracuse. And didn’t work in either direction from Philly to Cleveland.
In all cases, the TSA failed to have the scanner gun to make it work.
My advice is to print it out until you know for sure that they have the scanner. Otherwise, you’re going to wait in line, have it not work, then have to get out of line, go back to check-in and print a new boarding pass and wait all over again.
I flew Delta last week from D.C. to New Orleans and was able to do the whole flight with an electronic boarding pass. Delta sent me a text message which contained a link that I clicked on and that opened a webpage with the barcode and my seat assignment and other information. There was another link for the second leg of my flight. So I had to have those two web pages loaded in mobile Safari (or take a screenshot and store them in my Photo library).
When I got to the airport I was worried about TSA, but they had a scanner and I was able to clear security easily. At boarding time I simply presented my iPhone which the gate agent took and placed under the scanner. My only worry was that the agent would fumble my iPhone, but they were very careful and it was no problem.
Since I HATE paper, and have dedicated my life to eradicating it, it was pure joy to be able to board a plane without having to have to deal with it. I can truly say that this was one of the best flying experiences of my life.