Paperless Boarding Passes now Available on United Airlines

In a shocking move for UA’s crack IT department, you can now use your web-enabled mobile phone to check in for your flight and obtain a boarding pass. You can also check schedules, flight status, and flight availability on UA’s new beta mobile site.

Just go to mobile.united.com, login, and voila! You can pull up a barcode that can be used to clear security and board a plane. Sounds too good to be true for all who are familiar with United’s numerous technological deficiencies.

I was wondering why the BP scanners were showing up at the TSA checkpoints–I thought it might be a new security enhancement by DHS–but it appears that the readers are in place to scan mobile boarding passes.

The TSA likes the new mobile boarding passes:

The paperless boarding pass will … prevent fraudulent paper boarding passes that could be created and printed from home," the agency wrote on its blog.

A nice feature of UA’s mobile boarding pass is that if your seat changes, upgrade clears, or gate changes, your boarding pass can be refreshed to display the updated information. As long as that will not require a lengthy login and logout, that’s a handy feature.

The new paperless system is currently available at:

Chicago O’Hare (ORD)
Dallas – Fort Worth (DFW)
Denver (DEN)
Las Vegas (LAS)
Los Angeles (LAX)
New York LaGuardia (LGA)
Orlando (MCO)
Philadelphia (PHL)
Phoenix (PHX)
Portland (PDX)
San Francisco (SFO)
Seattle (SEA)
Washington Dulles (IAD)

It will soon be expanded to:

Atlanta (ATL)
Baltimore (BWI)
Minneapolis – St. Paul (MSP)
Salt Lake City (SLC)
Orange County – Santa Ana (SNA)

I still plan on collecting a paper boarding pass because I like having a hard copy record of my flight (and because I just like having a box full of thousands of boarding pass stubs from over the years), but I hope this new technology will save UA money and cut down on airport check-in lines.

I hope the skepticism expressed in my first paragraph is mispalced. Based on UA’s track-record on new technology, though, my hopes are not up. United joins Alaska, American, Continental, and Delta in offering a paperless boarding pass to passengers on select flights.

More details here.