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By Cindy Nawilis
Calling Shanghai’s jetsetters! China Eastern Airlines will be introducing online and mobile phone boarding to its services in Shanghai next year, most likely in anticipation of the upcoming World Expo 2010.
The online service, shockingly a Shanghai first (we're 30 cities behind on this!) will give passengers the ability to choose seats and print out boarding passes from China Eastern’s website.
Meanwhile, passengers using the phone service can download a barcode that, when scanned at the airport, prints out a boarding pass.
Other details are still pending, but the service should cut boarding times to just one minute.
A suggestion for China Eastern’s next goal: getting rid of delays.
Source: Shanghai Daily
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And what about luggage? Virtual reality luggage that we can upload to the MU website and download at destination?
The queues at the counters are mostly due to travelers with all kinds of luggage to check-in. The manual boarding passes at the counter usually take also just a minute. Boarding pass and luggage handled by one person.
Electronic check-in reality in Europe also still involves the queue at the luggage counter, and, behold, you should not have a kilo too much, else you have another queue to master at the cashiers. It takes 2 persons to check one passenger in, one to explain the machine and one behind the luggage counter.
Zero time saving for the passenger, zero cost saving for the airline, IMHO.
Ah but if you have only carry on . . .
Also, in the US and Hong Kong and Singapore - dumping your bags at a special only for online check-in counter is super easy, and its a lot shorter line than for the regular check-in.