It has been recently announced that Virgin Australia, American Airlines and Delta Airlines are getting ready to accept and work with a new form of mobile flight boarding pass - Apple's Passbook.
Passbook is a new feature of Apple's iOS6 operating system that is due to be released on Wednesday. A spokesperson for Virgin Australia confirmed that it will be making use of Passbook. This new feature will enable passengers to store their boarding passes on their iPhone. "The rumors are true, we'll be supporting Passbook for iPhone" stated the official tweet by Virgin Australia.
As reported by Skift, the travel blog, this weekend saw both American Airlines and Delta Airlines announce similar plans for Apple's Passbook. An official statement made by American Airlines on the Skift stated that they would be issuing an app update over the next few weeks that will support the use of Passbook.
The iOS6 operating system is one of the main features of the iPhone 5, set to be released on Wednesday. It will include Passbook, new languages for Apple's virtual personal assistant Siri, new maps and much more.
Along with boarding passes, Passbook will allow all iPhone users to hold loyalty cards, retail vouchers and coupons and movie tickets in one place. This means that the mobile handset can be used by scanned to use loyalty cards, enter the cinema and of course, board a plane. It will help reduce unnecessary queues and is one more way that companies like airlines are utilizing the capabilities of modern and powerful smartphone technology.
The move is similar to that made by Eurostar, the high speed train network that connects London with Paris and Paris to Lille and Brussels who launched a similar mobile boarding pass function as part of the new Eurostar train Android-powered application. This app generates a virtual ticket stored on a phone that can be scanned to access a train quickly. The company also made the feature available for iPad, iPod and iPhone users in March.