iPhone on the Road: a substitute for paper boarding passes

This is an Air Canada feature. Check in on blackberry, get SMS link. Click on link - 2D barcode. Obtain luggage tags from kiosk. Board flight.

*yawn*

Can be done with any destination, domestic or international, except the good ol paranoid US of A. TSA won't let AC do it there.

*sigh*

Didn't work for me! I had my boarding pass on my laptop - and they almost wouldn't let me through security - the woman was like, "I don't know computers..." she said it could've been a forgery or something?

They had to escort me to a desk to get a paper ticket. SFO

welcome to 2008.

I've tried this with JetBlue this past weekend - it didn't work. I'm actually quite surprised to hear that it works for someone. I don't know what type of scanners other airlines use, but every scanner I've seen so far was a regular laser scanner. This guy wouldn't be able to grab the code off the LCD screen, because the screen is not a reflective surface. There are CCD scanners that actually have a camera inside that grabs the picture of the code and analyzes it. This would work, but I don't think I've ever seen them on any airline.

I tried this approach once with an Austria railway train ticket. The scan did not work however, probably because the code on these tickets is 2D and the scanner to narrow to deal with screen scatter. A simple barcode might have worked.

However I often forget to take the printed ticket from the printer especially if I am in a hurry. Several times I was able to show the ticket on my iphone (link to PDF is always in the confirmation e-mail) to the train attendant and by manually copying the second alphanumeric code into his mobile ticketing machine he verified my ticket and printed out a small duplicate.

Delta has the same service, but it's somewhat flawed. I checked in on my iPhone and displayed a boarding pass. While the Delta customer service reps in Boston knew nothing about it, the TSA *did* and let me through. However, by the time I got to the gate, I'd made a phone call and that was enough to expire the page from Safari's cache - and I was NOT able to get the boarding pass to display again. So I was stuck at the gate and had to get a paper boarding pass. The bar code on the boarding pass would NOT scan at Delta's kiosks.

I did this in Europe in September. I traveled all over Europe via train and Airplane and the 6 times I had to fly within the continent, I had the boarding pass on my iPhone and everything would work out. Everyone was impressed with the iPhone and I would have to allocate time to let people play with it and hold up the line. I recall in London, while I was visiting Parliament (their version of Congress) I held up the security line because I was the first person to have an iPhone. They had to verify that it was not a bomb since they had never seen it. They wanted me to make phone calls but I kindly replied that it would cost me too much money since I am from the U.S. and finally I did call someone's cell phone so it could ring. They were relieved that it was the real thing and then proceeded to play with the iPhone for about 5 minutes, literally calling agents around the premises to check out the iPhone. At the Tower of London and Eye of London (since I prebooked online in the U.S.) were astonished that they could verify my info via the iPhone. All my travels in Europe were made perfect by the iPhone. I made KMZ files in Google Earth before I left and I uploaded them on my website. Via the Maps application I already had the locations I was going to visit during my stay. Check it out @ http://www.euroabroad.com if you do not believe me.

I did an online check in when I was flying Cathay Pacific, and all I needed was the unique ID. No need for barcodes. So I just snapped a picture of the unique ID on the lcd of the cafe's internet counter and that was that.

It won't be a bad idea to screenshot it any barcodes and import them into iPhoto for the iPods though.

That's brilliant.

So, if he already had the printed version to show the TSAs, why on earth did he bust out the iPhone at the gate? Just to be a smug show off?