The Perils of SMS Boarding Passes

This had slipped my mind but remembered this after receiving an advisory notice to a change for a future flight.

Jetstar offers the ability to receive your boarding pass on your phone which is then read by a scanner at the boarding gate. This is pretty handy as it reduces the amount of paper used up for temporary use and is one less bit of paper to lose when you are moving around!

However, there are some things to bear in mind.

Firstly, it is important to ensure that the phone screen is sufficiently bright in order to be read by the SMS scanner. Some people deliberately turn down the brightness of the screen in order to conserve battery life but this measure can interfere with the scanner’s success in reading the SMS boarding pass.

The other thing I discovered at the last minute is that you will need to have the handset that received the SMS ready at hand. On the day of our departure I decided to swap phones (from my Samsung Galaxy S to my Samsung Omnia 7). The problem was that the SMS boarding pass was on the Galaxy S and as I had already moved my SIM to my Omnia 7 the boarding pass was stranded on the Galaxy S. I ended up just taking my Galaxy S and Omnia 7 with me to Cairns to get around this issue. I’m sure I could have had the boarding pass resent but as we had already packed up our laptops it was going to take too long.

So while SMS boarding passes are handy they can also introduce new unexpected issues all the same.

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