Welcome to the first edition of Good News, Bad News. Today we will be focused on airlines, specifically American and Continental.
Good news: MSNBC is reporting that American Airlines is expanding its use of “mobile boarding passes” to 19 new airports. I have never used this service, but it sounds very cool, and incredibly convenient. I heard a few people in the early days say that it didn’t work for them, but supposedly the kinks are ironed out now. I think I will try it when I fly to Nashville next week.
And the bad news: CNN reports that Continental is going to discontinue giving customers in economy class free food on domestic flights, and flights to leisure destinations such as Cancun. Honestly, I’m surprised it’s taken them this long to discontinue the free food on domestic flights. It is the only airline I’ve flown on in the last few years that is still giving free food domestically. However, I think that not feeding the spring break or honeymoon crowd on the way to Cancun is a little surprising. Yes, it’s less than three hours from Houston, but it’s still international. Of course, the last time I ate free food on Continental coming home from Cancun I’m pretty sure I got food poisoning. But whatever.
I have mixed feelings about mobile boarding passes. They seem like they would be very convenient, especially for business travelers. But at Newark I have seen lots of people have problems with them not scanning properly. Just this morning a woman held up the security line for 10 minutes while she tried to zoom in, wipe the screen clean, zoom in again, etc. I have also seen people have to get out of line to go print out a paper boarding pass. I think there are some kinks to be worked out before I would feel comfortable relying on them.
i’ve never tried mobile boarding passes. i like to keep my PDFs all filed so i like any option that still allows me to electronically keep BPs on my computer