Paperless Boarding Passes

Now that the so called smart phones, such as the BlackBerry, the Nokia N series and the iPhone, are becoming more and more ubiquitous, so airlines are ramping up their paperless or electronic boarding pass programs. I came across this recently when flying KLM out of Amsterdam Schipol when returning from the State of the Map conference; I’d checked in online from my hotel room but had no access to a printer. KLM’s online check-in system offered me the option of having my boarding pass on my iPhone, which duly arrived as a link in an email.

British Airways allegedly offers this service out of London Heathrow though I’ve yet to see it being used and there’s no evidence of any scanners at the gates at Terminal 5 or Terminal 4. British Midland and Lufthansa are also operating trial programs and now Continental Airlines are offering a trial at San Francisco. When moving around Schipol the system worked incredibly well even though some staff seemed not to have heard of it and looked a bit confused when I showed them my phone after being asked for my boarding pass.

Posted via email from Gary’s Posterous

Another Piece Of Bloggage By Gary

Self professed "geek with a life", geo-blogger, geo-talker and geo-tweeter, Gary works in London and Berlin as Director of the Places Registry for Nokia; he's a co-founder of WhereCamp EU, the chair of w3gconf and sits on the W3C POI Working Group and the UK Location User Group. A contributor to the Mapstraction mapping API, Gary speaks and presents at a wide range of conferences and events including Where 2.0, State of the Map, AGI GeoCommunity, Geo-Loco, Social-Loco, GeoMob, the BCS GeoSpatial SG and LocBiz. Writing as regularly as possible on location, place, maps and other facets of geography, Gary blogs at www.vicchi.org and tweets as @vicchi.

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