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Downgraded: American Airlines luggage policy
American Airlines is the latest to charge an extra fee for a second checked bag. For a while, they were a holdout. This will apparently affect 4% of their passengers. I actually expected that number to be higher. Understandable move, considering the airline is losing $3.3M per day.

Downgraded: Skycap tips
Upgraded: Vindictiveness
American Airlines is being completely petty in their legal dispute with skycaps. You may recall that the skycaps won their suit, in which they argued that they were being cheated when the airline imposed a $2 fee, which most passengers believed to be paid to the skycap. (It was paid to the airline.) So now the airline strikes back by banning tips to skycaps. Vindictive, and frankly begging for another lawsuit.

Downgraded: Spirit Airlines’ baggage handling
Why just lose a passenger’s luggage, when you can burn the luggage instead?

Downgraded: Airline credit ratings, thanks to mergers. What?
Airlines keep saying how mergers will be just fab for their bottom lines. But credit rating agency Moodys’ predicts that airlines would be downgraded if mergers happen. Why? Moody’s doesn’t believe the merger partners will meet their goals, and won’t see the promised synergies happen.

Upgraded: WC signs
Better signage for public rest rooms than these? I haven’t seen them.

Upgraded: Paperless boarding passes
The TSA and Continental have teamed up to expand the use of paperless boarding passes for travelers with smartphones. I like!

Upgraded: Viagra, caffeine, and naps
For those seeking to beat jet lag, Viagra can help. (Seriously.) But for those not looking to channel their inner Bob Dole, caffeine and naps work well, too. How… intuitive.

Upgraded: Tracking your past travels
If you’ve traveled internationally between 1996 and 2006, and if you used an American credit or debit card abroad, you’re eligible for a refund of some undisclosed fees, thanks to a class action settlement. But unless you’re a supreme dork (umm, like me…) who has all your year-end summaries or stacks of credit card statements, you’ll need to estimate your spending. To make that work out for you, you need to know when you were out of the country. (For supreme dorks like me, there’s the running spreadsheet of flights and miles…) Debbie Dubrow of DeliciousBaby writes in with her credit card settlement hack to help you figure out how much time you were abroad: Look at your digital photos and check the dates. For pre-digital images, just browse the photo albums. Brilliant! But it’s not foolproof. My photos aren’t organized into albums. And on business travel, who takes photos??

Southwest took another step away from its rebellious past and another step toward being just another legacy carrier today. But if you’re traveling last minute on the company dime, there may be a silver lining: Expensive fares, usually bought very close to departure, will now come with a guaranteed “A”-group boarding pass, assuring early boarding and seat selection under Southwest’s open seating model. Plus, you get a free cocktail.

Unclear from early reports is how the number in one’s boarding group is calculated for these passengers. (Southwest recently started numbering boarding passes within the A, B, and C groups, and requiring passengers to board in sequential order.)

Many Southwest fans will be outraged. The airline is gradually moving away from its democratic model, and going with a “money talks, BS walks” approach.

But at the same time, loyalty will be rewarded, too. Much like elite frequent flyers at United, Northwest, or US Airways get access to “premium” economy seats, Rapid Rewards members with 32 flights under their belt in one year are guaranteed an “A” boarding pass.

And in a marketing spin, those expensive last-minute fares would now be termed “Business Select” fares.

(Ooooh, “select”… Isn’t that a grade of beef? Select… choice… prime… The old-style “cattle call” may be gone, but the bovine metaphors live on.)

So, to recap: Expensive tickets get more perks and better seats. Frequent flyers get “upgrades.” And the marketers are spinning tales about how revolutionary and great this all is.

Sounds like a “legacy” airline. Not that there’s anything necessarily wrong with that. But the low-cost revolutionary hype is not in tune with reality any more.

They’ve grown up, perhaps. But Southwest is turning into the airlines it once mocked. Welcome to middle age!

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UPDATE December 3, 2007: Southwest issued cease-and-desist orders to both of these sites, too. Looks like the automated check-in game is over.

In June 2006, Southwest Airlines sued the owners of a small website, boardfirst.com, that gave travelers the opportunity to automatically check into their flights 24 hours before takeoff. As Southwest travelers know, the key to getting a good seat under their open seating system is checking in early — especially now that the boarding passes are numbered, and not just divided into groups A, B, and C.

Southwest wouldn’t have any little pipsqueak helping their customers get an early spot in line, so they sued. Well, the airline won.

Speculation is now rife that they’ll introduce their own early-check-in system for a fee someday soon.

Looking back at my post from last year, in which six boarding-pass providers were named, only one is still up and running: PlaneFast. Better yet, PlaneFast is free to use (though they welcome donations). A new entrant, Pass-a-matic, is in a beta testing phase, but with PlaneFast already up and running — and free — why mess with a beta test when you can work with an established player?

So options still exist. Just fewer of them. In any case, boo Southwest.

UPDATE December 3, 2007: Southwest issued cease-and-desist orders to both of these sites, too. Looks like the automated check-in game is over.

Related:
- Getting the best seats on Southwest just got harder
- Southwest’s revised seating policy
- Southwest tests “families-only” section on planes

When e-tickets first rolled out, they held the promise of paperless travel. For example, Alaska Airlines, the first domestic U.S. carrier to introduce wireless check-in back in early 2001, offered this nugget to the media when they rolled it out: “Once a passenger checks in via a cell phone or another wireless device, he or she can go directly to the appropriate gate, show a photo identification and board the plane.” Ha!

Ah, what could’ve been. I was reminded of the pre-9/11 predictions of how e-travel would be when I read how Northwest Airlines rolled out upgrades to their website, allowing you to perform a greater number of services via wireless devices. If you browse over to their site with your mobile, you’ll be able to buy tickets, change reservations, check in, etc. (Other airlines, such as Southwest, let you check in for your flights, but don’t let you buy tickets wirelessly.) But fully electronic travel, once promised, is a bust. It’s still a paper-trail world. The trees aren’t safe.

You can’t print a paper boarding pass from your smartphone, after all. Even in Europe, where you can use SMS text messaging to check in, you still need to stop at an airport kiosk and choose to “reprint” the pass.

After 9/11, it was no longer possible to go through security without a paper boarding pass. Mind you, the real security benefit of this requirement is highly questionable. Sure, it means that fewer people actually pass through security, but having a slip of paper with your name on it really doesn’t make you any more or less of a threat. (See, for example, the hoopla surrounding the fake boarding pass generator.)

At the end of the day, I’m glad to have Northwest and others on the wireless train. Being able to make changes via the wireless web really is an improvement. But it falls short of the predictions that we could skip the paper boarding passes altogether. Or that gate readers could scan a phone, or swipe a card, at the gate. That would really put the “e” back into e-tickets. Dare to dream.

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Related:
- Forged boarding passes: Fraud, yes, but where is the security threat?

Two observations, as I’m looking at my boarding passes for my flight to Newark, just a couple hours away.

First, the 100 millionth passenger of 2006 lands at one of the New York airports (JFK, LGA, or EWR) today. Boy, I sure hope I’m the lucky winner. Imagine the perks!

Second, and more relevant to the boarding passes: I’m flying United today, but I’m reminded of a recent US Airways flight, and how those boarding passes differed. Those were also printed at home after online check-in, but they lacked a barcode. Here’s one:

I don’t fly US Airways much, so I honestly thought there must be some kind of error, and that the TSA or the airline would give me a hard time. I even asked a US Airways employee if the boarding pass looked okay, because it seemed so… half-assed. The image quality was crap, the print was tiny, and there was no barcode. Security? Ha! Anyone could forge this thing, even without Christopher Soghoian’s fake boarding pass generator. But she said it was fine, and she gave me one of those “is this guy nuts” looks. Good enough!

I suppose US Airways prefers people-power, manually entering passenger data into the computer to check passengers in, to technology.

A few days ago, an Indiana University PhD student in computer science named Christopher Soghoian decided to post a fake boarding pass generator on his personal webpage. The site let you enter a name, flight number, etc., to make it appear like a genuine Northwest Airlines boarding pass, good enough to get through security. Soghoian suggested three purposes for such a fake:

1. Meet your elderly grandparents at the gate
2. ‘Upgrade’ yourself once on the airplane - by printing another boarding pass for a ticket you’re already purchased, only this time, in Business Class.
3. Demonstrate that the TSA Boarding Pass/ID check is useless.

Number 2 is just stupid and tantamount to stealing. You’ll never upgrade yourself or get on a plane for free by forging your boarding pass, since the barcode won’t register the correct flight or seat when it’s scanned. You’d be trying to rip off the airline, and you’d be escorted out by security rather quickly…

Number 3 is a fair point, but one that’s been made before. Pointing out that a print-at-home boarding pass could be “hacked” is nothing new. Senator Chuck Schumer of New York detailed the process by which boarding passes can be hacked at a press conference last year, and the issue has been raised in Slate and Schneier.com. Someone else posted a way to forge your otherwise legitimate Southwest Airlines boarding pass, so it always registers in group “A.” And as for number 1, there are people who have simply been using Adobe Acrobat for years to edit the date on an old boarding pass so they can gain access to the secure area of the airport to meet someone — after submitting to screening, of course.

Posting a boarding pass generator was stupid, and got the site shut down, along with a visit from the FBI. But it’s really nothing new, and, I contend, at no point was there ever a real threat to security. Every single person who has ever used one of these little tricks still had to submit to a screening. If the checkpoint is doing its job, then the name or date on the boarding pass shouldn’t matter.

So why NOT let anyone go to the gate, if they’re willing to pass through security? Why even bother with checking identification?

For starters, the airlines don’t want you forging boarding passes, since they don’t make tickets transferable, and they want to make sure the person buying the ticket is actually the person flying. If your friend wanted to fly on your ticket, you could check yourself in, give your friend your real boarding pass AND a fake one in his name. He would use the forged pass at security and the real pass (with your name) at the gate.

There’s also the matter of the no-fly list. The airline is supposed to catch people on that list at the time of check-in. But like the friend using someone else’s ticket in the example above, a fake boarding pass, a fake id, and a separate, real boarding pass in someone else’s name could let you bypass the no-fly list and get you through security and on board. But even then, you still would need to submit to security. (And let’s leave the fact that the no-fly list is riddled with errors aside.)

Airlines also try to make sure that passengers are supposed to travel on the same plane as their luggage. Therefore, boarding pass hand-offs are frowned upon. But again, if the luggage is screened, and the passenger is screened, then there really shouldn’t be a concern about matching bags to passengers.

Finally, security personnel don’t want more work than necessary, and airports want to reduce wait times and lines. Allowing anyone to go to the gate would increase manpower expenses or wait times. Neither option is appealing to airport managers.

At the end of the day, it comes down to the ability of security personnel to find weapons and detect threats. And if people truly believe that the security at TSA checkpoints is adequate, then the fuss about forged boarding passes is all a waste of time. If security isn’t adequate, then that needs to be fixed, but it still doesn’t make a difference whose name is on the boarding pass.

UPDATE 11/1/06: Someone has posted a mirror of the original site here. Nothing ever stays secret once it’s on the internet… And as others such as Mere Rhetoric have pointed out, a forged boarding pass isn’t going to make or break security. The screening at the checkpoint will. And the screening has a number of gaps. Big gaps. Filling those gaps is more important than busting a computer programmer in Indiana.