Pretty Cool! United Airlines Will Now Deliver Partner Boarding Passes Through Their Mobile App

One of the frustrating parts of international travel is dealing with boarding passes from multiple airlines. It’s really common to book a trip to Europe or Asia that involves more than one airline.

For example, on a family trip to Paris, we’ve flown United Airlines to Frankfurt and then Lufthansa on to Paris. That involves dealing with multiple confirmation numbers, websites, seating assignments and boarding passes. Under the best of circumstances, this process is annoying. Suffer a glitch somewhere and it’s a nightmare.

According to Zach Honig at The Points Guy, United is greatly simplifying one of those steps. In the future, United will have the capability to deliver boarding passes from multiple airlines to their mobile app.

It appears this is just for flights that involve a partner AND a flight on United airlines. I don’t think the app will serve you up a boarding pass for a Lufthansa flight you booked using miles if there’s not a United segment in there. But, I’m working on getting a better answer.

For now, here’s the press release and the list of airlines this now works with:

United Airlines (UAL) today announced a new enhancement to the United app that will allow customers to receive boarding passes when connecting to 19 airline partners on their smart phones, a feature which no other U.S. carrier currently offers. This functionality will be available for customers traveling on United who are making an onward connection on another carrier and will improve the functionality of United’s award winning app, which is relied on over 500 million times a year by customers.

“As we continue to make improvements to the United app, we found that simply allowing our customers to access boarding passes for their entire itinerary within the same app made a big difference,” said Kate Gebo, chief customer officer at United. “Our partnerships with Star Alliance carriers and other partner airlines can take our customers to over a thousand destinations around the world, and we’re excited to be the first U.S. carrier to provide customers with this convenience when connecting to partners.”

The following airline partners’ boarding passes are now accessible through the United app, with more partners to be added in the near future:

• Adria Airways
• Aegean Airlines
• Air Canada
• Air New Zealand
• ANA
• Asiana Airlines
• Austrian Airlines
• Azul Brazilian Airlines
• Brussels Airlines
• Cape Air
• Croatia Airlines
• EVA Airways
• LOT Polish Airlines
• Lufthansa
• Scandinavian Airlines
• Shenzhen Airlines
• SWISS
• THAI Airways
• Turkish Airlines

The Final Two Pennies

This is definitely something no other US-based airline is doing. And, it’s a big plus. Getting airline reservations systems to talk is incredibly complicated. It’s exacerbated based on the age of some of these systems. I really hope this is just the next step in deeper integration between alliance partners. And, I really hope the other 2 legacy US carriers follow suit.

The post Pretty Cool! United Airlines Will Now Deliver Partner Boarding Passes Through Their Mobile App was published first on Pizza in Motion