It looks like paper plane tickets are finally be superseded by mobile phones. According to the New York Times Continental Airlines have been testing mobile phone boarding passes since December. The airline industry has talked about mobile boarding passes (as opposed to mobile phone check-in) before, and the process has got the backing of the IATA (International Air Transport Association) but Continental is one of the first companies to actually go ahead with a full blown pilot.
Continental’s favoured system is a 2D barcode, which is scanned from the passengers’ mobiles and apparently harder to fake than other tokens.
I’m struggling to see a downside here: it saves time, saves paper, it saves the airlines a bit of cash and I’m far less likely to lose my mobile than I am a plane ticket. Please, airlines, hurry up and make mobile boarding passes the standard.