American Airlines makes ready for the new iPhone
Apple is expected to introduce a new iPhone 5 this Wednesday and one of the new features will be Passbook, a digital wallet that store gift cards, loyalty cards, reward cards, incentive cards, ticketing, and boarding passes. From Apple’s website:
Your boarding passes, movie tickets, retail coupons, loyalty cards, and more are now all in one place. With Passbook, you can scan your iPhone or iPod touch to check in for a flight, get into a movie, and redeem a coupon.
You can also see when your coupons expire, where your concert seats are, and the balance left on that all-important coffee bar card.
Wake your iPhone or iPod touch, and passes appear on your Lock screen at the appropriate time and place — like when you reach the airport or walk into the store to redeem your gift card or coupon.
And if your gate changes after you’ve checked in for your flight, Passbook will even alert you to make sure you’re not relaxing in the wrong terminal.
When Apple gave a preview of Passbook at a developer conference last June they said that United was planning to support it, but didn’t mention any other airline partners.
Here’s some good news I came across on Skift.com:
A spokesperson for American Airlines reveals it will be “rolling out an app update in the coming weeks in support of Passbook. In the meantime, customers can still access their mobile boarding passes in the current version of American’s mobile app.”
American was the first airline to offer a native iPhone app and one of the things they do really well is make it easy to manage your travel plans with technology. I’m a enthusiastic iPhone user and can’t wait to try Passbook. Go here to read the rest of the article.
Speaking of iPhone Apps, here’s a nifty little iPhone game for aviation and travel enthusiasts:
AirportGeek is a quiz game that tests your knowledge of IATA airport codes. You’re given the name of an airport, just provide the correct three letter code to earn points, game credits and extra time.
AA iPhone App looks a rehash of their mobile website, which is not very useful.
I’m hoping that United has an update in the next few days to their app with support for passbook. It is not very complicated, and is probably only a few hours of programming, I have made some mock boarding passes just to see how it looked, and it took me a couple hours, and that was with manually putting in all the data and such, not one generated with existing data. Can’t imagine the story is much different for AA.
Siri integration would be nice.
Me: Siri, when’s the new flight to Dallas?
Siri: I’m sorry, I can’t help you with flights.
:p
Wonder how much data American / Delta will allow onto the new iPhone passbook since they’ve taken the access away from AwardWallet?
@ MichaelP – My favorite feature of the app is the parking reminder. Other than that, I prefer the mobile site.
@ Kris Ziel – UA was smart to get a head start on everyone else, I’d be surprised if they did’t go live when the new iPhone launches. Thanks for the comment!
@ Miles – 😀
@ The Weekly Flyer – I”m a registered iOS developer and Apple provides technical documentation detailing what data is shared, how it’s shared, security protocols, how they manage personally identifying information, and liability agreements.
So unlike the Award Wallet situation, it’s a partnership rather than a one way transfer of user data from the airline to a third party without any of those items in place. Of course, I realize I probably sound like an AApologist. 😉
American’s new iPhone app update better come with standby and upgrade lists in addition to Passbook
@ Jamison – I like your idea. I’d pay for those features.
Passbook sounds like a useful new app. I look forward to trying it out!
This looks safer than award wallet.
It would be nice if all airlines would follow AA and won’t need any paper boarding passes any more.
@ VI – I imagine that the days of paper boarding passes are few. Thanks for reading!