Selfies: The New Boarding Pass
Jennifer Billock June 08, 2017
Let’s all take a selfie with JetBlue! It’s the new way to board a plane.
JetBlue is launching a new program that eliminates boarding passes in favor of everyone’s favorite photo: the selfie. It will be considered a self-boarding process. Instead of using a traditional printed boarding pass, travelers can opt in to have photos taken of their faces. The photos will be stored in a database that matches up to visa, passport, and immigration photos using biometrics and facial recognition.
“We hope to learn how we can further reduce friction points in the airport experience, with the boarding process being one of the hardest to solve,” Joanna Geraghty, executive vice president of customer experience at JetBlue, told Forbes. “Self-boarding eliminates boarding pass scanning and manual passport checks. Just look into the camera and you’re on your way.”
The matching database will also verify a passenger’s flight details and will notify them when it’s okay to board. All the crewmembers will have iPad minis as well, allowing them to interact with passengers throughout.
The first flights with this new process are happening this month, on trips from Boston to Aruba.
“This biometric self-boarding program for JetBlue and [U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP)] is designed to be easy to use,” Jim Peters, chief technology officer at SITA, told Forbes. “What we want to deliver is a secure and seamless passenger experience. We use sophisticated technologies to enable biometric checks and for CBP authorization to be sent quickly to the airline’s systems. This is the first integration of biometric authorization by the CBP with an airline and may prove to be a solution that will be quick and easy to roll out across US airports.”
No word yet on whether duckface photos will work for boarding. Sorry, everybody.
It's not called a selfie is SOMEONE ELSE takes the picture! A selfie is a picture that YOU take OF YOURSELF. But in the case, it says JetBlue will take your picture, not take a random picture that you happened to take of yourself. Thus this article's assumption that the pictures JetBlue will use are "selfies" is downright silly.