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Tuesday, 3 February 2009

Phones fighting airport queues
10:16 PM :: 0 Comments ::

NEW YORK: Cellphones will be the new weapon against long airport queues this year.

Mobile ticketing, in which travellers receive a special bar code on their cellphones that acts as a boarding pass, is taking off both in Europe and the US, reports AJC.com.

Delta, Continental and American Airlines have all launched mobile ticketing programs.

“This is more convenient for customers, and it’s also good for the environment,” says Delta.com managing director Josh Weiss.

He says the service has taken more time to roll out than expected because of delays installing machines at airport gates that can read the screens of hundreds of different types of phones.

Cellphone check-in

Many European carriers have launched mobile ticketing trials, including Air France and Britain’s BMI.

In the US, the main pioneer is Continental Airlines, which has been enabling phone check-in services at certain airports since 2007.

Texas-based American Airlines also introduced mobile boarding passes in November and is also considering extending the program.

Transportation-related mobile ticketing is expected to mushroom from 37.4 million transactions in 2007 to more than 1.8 billion by 2011, according to British company Juniper Research.

It estimates the airline industry could save $500 million a year with mobile ticketing, slashing paper and ink costs plus the costs of the magnetic strip encoding equipment.

Analysts said that mobile ticketing is a win-win situation for both passengers and airlines.

“Internationally the process has caught on faster, with even Estonian Airlines having introduced mobile phone check-in,” says Arvai Group president Ernest Arvai, a consulting firm to the airline industry based in New Hampshire.

- Image via phonedog.com

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