At airports, I’ve always waited in line to get a printed boarding pass. Time for a change I guess.

Apparently I can check online and print my boarding pass as a pdf at home or even download the airline’s app and get a qr code to print the boarding pass at a kiosk inside the airport. Do I need an active internet connection at the airport to use the kiosk? I wont have internet there.

My airline explains they can send a pdf copy of the boarding pass to my email address. Is it really not a problem to print my boarding pass on regular office paper and not on cardboard airlines use?

If I download the airline’s app to get the qr code to print the boarding card at the kiosk, will the airline spam me with ads I don’t want?

Can I both print the boarding pass at home AND get the qr code to print the boarding pass at the kiosk?

Apparently there is something called ‘receive boarding pass by sms’. How does this work?

  • kirklennon
    3•9 months ago

    But the stakes are too high to skip the 5 minutes it takes to print a paper copy. I can almost guarantee that everyone else is one close call/missed flight away from doing the same thing, too.

    I don’t understand what scenario you’re imagining where there’s a problem. You check in 24 hours before the flight and add the pass to your phone. It’s not going anywhere. How would you ever miss a flight because you didn’t print it? Absolute worst case scenario: they have to look it up at the gate.

    • @gsfraley
      1•9 months ago

      Leonardo De Lima, who works in technology, was on his way to Boston Logan International Airport around 5 a.m. for a business trip to Chicago when he realized his phone was in SOS mode. He initially thought it was a problem with his device, until he got to the Delta terminal and saw a lot of confused faces.

      “I heard people talking about the outage, and everyone was lingering in the departure area because nobody could pull up their tickets on their phones,” the 32-year-old said. “I saw a lot of stress.”

      • kirklennon
        1•9 months ago

        Sounds a bit sensationalist and doesn’t contradict what I said: if you already added your boarding pass to your phone, it will still be there, regardless of whether you have internet access at the moment. Furthermore, the staff can still pull up your record so nobody is going to miss their flight.

        • @gsfraley
          1•9 months ago

          No, my phone went into SOS mode yesterday. No apps, just a button to call 911. And yes, if you lose a ticket, you can indeed miss a flight. Only tale I have for that is a colleague who lost their ticket and the time it took to look up their details put them past boarding, they were stranded at the terminal, but its still an actual risk you can’t wave away.

          It takes 5 minutes to save an insane amount of stress and misfortune.

          • kirklennon
            1•9 months ago

            No, my phone went into SOS mode yesterday. No apps, just a button to call 911.

            That’s not a thing that exists. The closest thing is the shutdown screen, where the options are “slide to power off,” “Medical ID,” “Emergency SOS” and a cancel button, which requires you to enter your passcode and then takes you back to the home screen.