For me it is less about being concerned about my device running out of batteries. It's more about some weird incompatibility between my device and the scanner.
It's one less thing to worry about when I just want to get on the plane. My paper ticket isn't going to lock before I get to the gate, or not be bright enough. I won't have to "play" with my ticket to keep it active and proper for the scanner.
> It's more about some weird incompatibility between my device and the scanner.
I think I held up an entire flight for nearly an hour because the QR code on my Graphene OS Android phone scanned fine at the TSA checkpoint but didn't scan at all at the gate. They ended up letting me on the flight without properly registering that I boarded in their system. That triggered some crazy security hold that prevented the crew from obtaining permission to pull back from the gate.
When that happens (and note it happens to paper boarding passes as well) I've always seen gate agents simply type in the details off the boarding pass. E.g. name, sequence number, etc and do a manual entry that way. I've had this happen to me at least once, and the agent very quickly just typed in something in their terminal and it was all done with no fuss. Really surprised no one thought of doing this in your situation.
> and god forbid if your drop your smartphone and get it cracked
Then you print a boarding pass at the kiosk? But I've cracked a phone once in ten years, it's not really something I'm worried about.
And paper isn't reliable. For most people, you're much more likely to lose a random sheet of paper than for your phone to suddenly permanently stop working.
Those kiosks are gone from many airports. You're going to have to wait in line to get anything printed. And if you fly Ryanair it will cost you over 50 euro.
I didn't know that. Based on what do they print a boarding pass, or perhaps rather: why don't they check {whatever the answer to the previous question is} at boarding instead of you having to hold onto a pass that apparently is a proxy for something else?
I've had a boarding pass reissued at the gate based on my passport.
Some airlines in Europe check both the boarding pass and the passport/identity card at the boarding gate, to ensure people haven't swapped boarding passes within the airport. I think I see this on flights outside the EU, but I'm not sure.
Hmm but what lookup does a human need to do? Identity documents have had chips for quite some years now so you just need to touch it to the reader and beep through, or for even older ones, they've had a machine-readable section since as long as I'm alive. A standardized government-issued passport is probably faster to read than a potentially dark and reflective phone screen or crinkled piece of paper, and equally fast in the case where the person presents a well-readable document. The gate doesn't even need to do any database lookup: it can locally store the list of the 200-odd names of passengers during boarding
I'm just speculating but if they can simply do a name+DOB-based lookup at a counter, it seems to me like the boarding pass thing might just be for historic reasons where people would feel weird if they are suddenly tracked based on personal details instead of a ticket
> That's not a thing. They're literally just cameras looking for a QR code.
And yet for me one time earlier this year said QR code on my Graphene OS phone scanned fine at the TSA checkpoint but refused to scan at the gate, leading to mayhem as the crew couldn't figure out for nearly an hour why the number of people sitting on the plane wasn't equal to the number of people who they registered as boarding.
I've had airline machines fail to scan the barcode on my poorly printed paper boarding passes (e.g. faded ink or unfortunate located gaps etc in the barcode area). The solution is simple, just type in the details off the BP into the terminal to look up my PNR and type the command to confirm I've boarded. I've seen this done for both paper and mobile boarding pass issues. Not a mobile issue but obviously poor staff training and problem solving which occurs with or without mobiles.
It's one less thing to worry about when I just want to get on the plane. My paper ticket isn't going to lock before I get to the gate, or not be bright enough. I won't have to "play" with my ticket to keep it active and proper for the scanner.