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Virgin’s become the first UK airline to add Passbook integration to online check-in, allowing you to send your boarding card straight to your iOS device, rather than doing that old-fashioned thing of printing out a boarding pass. All hail the onwards march of progress — even if it does have an god-awful QR code for a face.
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Surely this is one of those times a QR code makes sense?
This is one of those times when NFC makes a lot more sense….
But the tech for scanning a GR code is already in place. I’m not saying NFC wouldn’t do the same job but as it is my first comment still stands.
QR codes on the back of a van though …completely moronic!
The tech for scanning an NFC tag is faster and more robust – you don’t need a camera, or underlying image recognition software, so that source of error is taken out of the loop.
Just touch your phone to the reader, still in case or pouch, and you’re done.
A lot of airports have QR Code capable readers, not many have NFC enabled readers, so makes sense to stick with the QR code right now and save shelling out extra.
Either way the end result is the same I guess.
I thought most of them were geared more towards barcodes rather than QR codes?
Though saying that, the last few times I’ve flown have either been with Corporate Air Travel, so ticketless; or I’ve been enjoying the free bar, so not cared!
In my experience it’s optical readers vs laser readers, Optical can read either but lasers only traditional barcodes?
Correct – you only need a one dimensional reader for a barcode, whereas you need an optical reader for the 2D QR codes.
What they don’t mention here, is that Virgin send you an email with this QR code in. So you don’t even need to go through the extra pointless step of loading it into Passbook.
I’ve been doing this with my local cinema for years, I book online, they email me a QR code and they scan it off my phone and let me in when I get there.
I was kind of wondering what the point of Passbook was, now I see, it really doesn’t have one.
Yeah, same with ryan air/easyjet. saves on a bit of paper though …trees and all that!
Auto-updating of flight info and gate is quite nice though.
Especially at London airports where the gates are assigned close to departure.
Can the VA tickets also be decrypted to tell you whether you’re going to get fondled by the TSA?
And ruin the surprise?
Well they have in the US
This really isn’t anything new. Everytime I’ve flown with BA, I’ve used their app in the very way ‘passbook’ now intends to. Works a charm and never that mad rush to ‘find the boarding pass’ ever again!
Bonus of passbook is that it will update automagically. BA app you need to refresh manually.
Plus it looks pretty.
I’m guessing this is because no one wants to get into bed with their godawful iOS app with its ‘where’s Richard’ game? It has 1.5 very sad-looking stars in the app store…
DOn’t you get a boarding pass anyway? If only for duty free purposes?