When I was confirming my seat earlier in the week with Continental I saw there was an option to get a mobile boarding pass and I decided it would be pretty cool to go paperless and signed up to receive my boarding pass on the phone. The way it works is that you get an email with a special link to your boarding pass which then must be displayed on your phone or PDA. I’d seen mobile check-in opportunities with American and Luftansa recently but nothing quite like this:
What you are looking at is a poorly merged set of screenshots from the E71. I wiped out my frequent flier number and the trip confirmation code, but otherwise this is what you get. The QR code was scanned by the TSA at security with a handheld device and I made sure to mention to the next TSA team that my boarding pass was my phone since that had to pass through the larger scanners … No problem and I walked right through. At the gate, I think I was the first passenger to present a mobile boarding pass to the particular gate staffer as he had no idea where to put the phone to scan it in the table-top scanner. His colleague showed him you just place it on the base and a moment later I was checked-in and on the jetway.
I hope more airlines start offering this service because one less thing to deal with is a benefit when you are traveling. I always have my phone and it was very easy to simply show the screen instead of fumbling with a piece of paper.
One tip for Nokia users … I’ve had bad coverage in airports previously and was not going to take any chances with boarding and security process so I used the ever helpful but easy to miss “Save this Page” feature of the S60 browser. Once saved, I simply navigated to my bookmarks, went into the saved pages folder and chose my boarding pass.