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Continental Letting Flyers Use Cell Phones As Plane Tickets

by Tim Stevens on December 5, 2007 at 11:42 AM


So the paper ticket is dead, and a new move by Continental Airlines could mean that even paper boarding pass may be the next to go. The airline is currently testing out digital boarding passes that lets you use your cell phone as a ticket.

Contintental's new system, which is being tested in Houston for the next three months, sends you a digital two-dimensional bar code, a square of pixels that represents your boarding info. Just display that bar code on your cell phone's screen, then pass the phone screen under the scanner and voila, you're ready to board. You've also save a tree while managing to reduce the number of things you have to remember to pack for your trip by one.

Continental is the first U.S. airline to test out cell phone tickets, but other domestic carriers, including U.S. Airways and Delta, are looking into the service.

Cell phones and bar codes are becoming quite the pair, with Orange enabling European phones to serve up advertising based on pictures of bar codes. That said, the whole bar code scanning tech seems a bit quaint. Why can't we just move on to global RFID tags already?

From USA Today

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Tags: boarding pass, BoardingPass, breaking+news, Cell phones, CellPhones, Continental, top, Travel Tech, TravelTech

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