It’s been quite a while since the elaborate paper tickets, issued by airlines, made way for e-ticket printouts. Subsequently, even the printouts were done away with, and now one can walk in after flashing a ticket booking on a mobile or a tablet.

But the ubiquitous boarding pass, a collectible for many, has survived all this. It is a rite-of-passage to get the stub (or on international flights, most of the boarding card itself) torn off before you board.

If you’ve flown domestic on Jet Airways recently, you would have noticed that the airline doesn’t tear away the boarding card stub anymore, and passengers can retain the entire card, giving flyers a chance to romanticise it in their travel scrapbooks, diaries or as a bookmark.

Digital records

According to Jet Airways, this has been done in response to a recent advisory issued by the Bureau of Civil Aviation Security (BCAS), which scrapped the need for physical stub retention (with the airline), and instead this record cab ne kept in digital form.

Although this advisory came out in the first-half of 2017, Jet Airways is the only airline that has completely scrapped retaining the stubs.

“The whole thing was very mechanical. You had to put it together, submit it subsequently, and keep the inventory for some number of days for investigations,” Jet Airways said, adding that not tearing the boarding cards also saves time. “For an airline that operates over a 100 departures from Delhi and Bombay everyday, that translates into substantial savings of time in terms of process,” it says.

IndiGo has not implemented the practice yet, but has initiated a pilot project in New Delhi. “We intend to introduce technology to replace physical tearing off of stubs at ladder points. A pilot project involving hand-held scanners for reconciliation of boarding passes is already going on,” the airline told BusinessLine. According to travellers who recently took off from the Mumbai Airport, even Air India has stopped tearing the stub off the boarding card.

Jet Airways’ move to let passengers keep the boarding card has met with a positive response from some. Ajay Kumar, a frequent flyer with the airline, hopes paperless boarding passes soon. “This will eliminate the need for printouts and save me about five minutes at the airport.”

At the Rajiv Gandhi International Airport in Hyderabad, an Express Security Check Lane was introduced in August 2017, where flyers without check-in baggage can print their boarding cards at the forecourt area and proceed directly to the security check area. Not just this, the boarding cards aren’t stamped at security check for most flights, and are instead scanned to indicate that the security check has been cleared.

As passenger-related processing at airports gets more and more digitised, the day when paperless boarding becomes a reality does not seem far away. Till then, hold on to those boarding cards and let the memories fly with you.

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