American Airlines iPhone App Soars

A few days before a recent flight to Chicago I received one of those annoying promotional emails from American Airlines encouraging me to download the airline’s free iPhone app. Since I was about to hop an American flight, I thought I’d give it a try.

What I found was pretty standard: flight schedules, a place to view my reservations, a terminal map for a few of AA’s hub airports and online check in. You can even monitor your place on the standby list. What I didn’t expect were mobile boarding passes.

Maybe this is no big deal, but I’m not all that tech savvy (shocking I know) so I thought this was pretty cool stuff. The ability to check in online and print boarding passes from home has been around for awhile, but the AA app allowed me to create a mobile boarding pass on my handy-dandy iPhone which I just showed to the TSA folks and the gate agent. The app actually creates a scannable boarding pass right on my screen. Nothing to print, nothing to keep up with (other than my phone) no paper, no fuss.

Maybe every flier at the airport is already doing this and I’m just late to the party, but I’m glad I finally arrived.