I don’t know about you, but every time I’m in an airport I find it almost impossible to keep up with all of the necessary paperwork: my passport, tickets, itinerary, boarding passes, etc. It would sure be great if someone would invent a simple electronic method of capturing all this information — something that could be easily carried in a coat pocket, with no paperwork, no tickets or boarding passes.



Wait a minute; they already have. It’s called your cell phone.

According to news.com, Continental airlines is currently experimenting with a new system that allows passengers to check in using their cell phone, and have an electronic boarding pass sent directly to their phones, allowing them to pass through airport security and board their flight without using any paper tickets or passes whatsoever.

Of course ticketless flights had been around for a long time, mostly using a passenger’s credit card as identification. But using a mobile phone as your ticket and boarding pass has never been tried before. That is, until Continental began experimenting with the procedure this year.

Other airlines, including Continental, Delta, and American have already allowed passengers to check in the other cell phone, but they were still required to print out a ticket or boarding pass before being allowed through security and onto the plane. Continental’s new strategy is an entirely electronic ticketing and boarding process, that will use no paper at all.

So far, Continental’s passengers seem to be responding very favorably to the cell phone check-in and boarding pass process. Research shows that more and more travellers have been printing their boarding passes from their home computers to avoid the long flight check-in lines. But for those traveling on business or in a strange town for the first time, it is not always easy to access a printer.

By digitizing the entire process, and having both your ticket and your boarding pass linked to your cell phone, passengers can simply arrive at the airport and go directly to security. After that, they simply board the plane using the electronic boarding pass on their cell phone. It certainly sounds like a much quicker process than most of us go through when trying to make a flight.

So far, Continental is only using the cell phone ticket and boarding pass procedure on flights from the airline’s hub in Houston. But the results so far been very positive, so the airline will likely expand the service to other airports by late spring.