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tptacek

Previously:

http://passfail.squarespace.com/

http://blog.timoni.org/post/318322031/a-practical-boarding-p...

Within the next 10 years, boarding passes are going to be obsolete anyways.

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  Boarding passes need to change. But here’s the question:
  Is re-structuring the information enough or is the 
  boarding pass concept obsolete?

i don't know if the whole boarding pass 'concept' will be obsolete because it basically passes the buck to smartphones, kiosks and intelligent seating (or some other novel contraption which alerts you to where your gate is, where and when you board and where your seat is). Maybe you know something that i don't, but those seem like problems that are solved handily (even if poorly) by ephemeral printed boarding passes with a minimum of fuss.

For me, the problem is primarily that the people who design boarding passes, either printed or mobile, seem to do a remarkably small amount of flying themselves (or at least they are willfully ignorant of the needs various travelers have). It's ok to assume that phones with embedded context info will solve many of these issues, but the amount of information contained in a printed boarding pass is significant and, for the most part, dependency free.

I'm not trying to be contrarian, i also want boarding passes to be obsoleted, but it seems to me that "the wayfinding problem" isn't going away anytime soon.

In what way obsolete? Unfortunately, I don't think it's going to be the "good" kind of obsolete where you don't have to keep track of a piece of paper. The only thing I can see now is that it turns into something of a dna/retna scan or you need to provide something biological to fly.

It's going to be on your phone, the way it already is for several airlines/airports now.

What if you don't own a fancy smart-phone? What if your phone's battery is dead, or the screen smashed.

I think airports will become obsolete before paper tickets.

In those 1-2% cases, you can print a boarding pass, just like you do now.

Everyone is going to own a fancy smart-phone; the marginal cost of adding "smart" to a "phone" is asymptotically approaching zero.

That doesn't mean people will know how to use them. It's easy to understand what you do with a slip of paper (keep it with your passport, show it when asked) vs get this app, keep phone charged, open app and bring up pass when requested etc.

Years ago people were proselytising about the paperless office and we still don't have that. We're not going to have paperless airports any time soon.

People in Kenya are better at taking advantage of phones than we are; the M-Pesa system is much more widespread than Square is here. People know how to use mobile tech just fine. There will still be boarding passes, but in 10 years, most people are just going to use their phones.

The airline I catch most often has the option of an RFID tag or their branded (RFID) credit card, or you can use your phone to display a QR-code via their app, or an EAN barcode if you just have the confirmation email.

If you only have carry-on luggage you just head to the gate, no need to deal with a check-in counter or anything.

Once you get to the gate, you scan your pass and it prints a small slip with seat + flight number.

Of course, international flights still have all the rigmarole of big paper passes.

Oh, and their printable boarding passes already look like: http://passfail.squarespace.com/storage/boardingpass_airnz.j...

The international ones are still fairly standard: http://jecielkonsult.com/onewebstatic/928d2eb4df-perakl6.JPG

Yes, but I hate it when the TSA agent writes all over my phone ticket.

I've never had this happen.

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