Qantas, Virgin Air Considering Paperless Boarding Passes For Mobile Phones, PDAs

Sydney, Australia (AHN) - Qantas and Virgin Air are considering an environmental friendly solution designed to reduce paper use by shifting to mobile phone boarding passes for flights. The two airlines made the announcement Friday, a day after the International Air Transport Association (IATA) said it was setting up a global standard to allow bar codes to be used as boarding passes. The IATA standard will use a single type of cheap and readily available scanner that can read existing codes from Europe, North America and Japan.

Under the system, air ticket purchasers provide their mobile phone numbers to the airline when they book a flight. The airline will send them a text message containing the two-dimensional bar code that can be stored on the phone or a personal digital assistant. The bar code on the phone or PDA screen is then checked by airline staff and confirmed boarding the plane.

The solution is another environmental friendly effort crafted by the IATA and designed to eliminate the use of paper in the check-in process. In 2004, the IATA said it was planning to use a global paperless ticketing system by 2007, which would save an estimated $3 billion USD in printing costs. The IATA said the bar code boarding pass system could be in place as early as 2010. Already, Air Canada, Air Berlin and Spanair allow mobile check-in.

IATA chief executive Giovanni Bisignani said, "This standard is an important step in getting rid of paper that bogs down processes and drives up costs."