Two people checking-in on a single phone

May 11, 2015 12:41 PM

My wife and I are flying soon and I want to try the mobile app check-in and boarding pass. However, we are both on the account for the tickets. Has anyone used the app when more than one person is flying, and if so, what did you do?
posted by grefo to Travel & Transportation (13 answers total)

If you bought the tickets together, one person has the option to check both travelers in.
posted by Miss T.Horn at 12:44 PM on May 11, 2015 [1 favorite]

If your concern is only having one electronic boarding pass I believe you can email the link to the second electronic boarding pass to your wife and she can open it on her own phone.
posted by Cosine at 12:45 PM on May 11, 2015 [4 favorites]

With my recent flight on US Air, the process was this: check in online (or open the app and it sends you to the website to check in online) and click the "send to app or email" button instead of the "print passes" button. It confirms the email address you want it sent to. Then, you receive an email that includes the boarding passes as images (or pdfs, I forget which). When you open the app and tap "boarding pass wallet", it checks your email, finds the image file, and opens it (brings that data into the app). If you didn't have the airline's app, you could just use your phone's email app to scan the barcode at the airport checkpoints. Same data, same image, different interface - the airport doesn't care.

If you're receiving two boarding passes, I think you can send them from check-in to different email addresses, in which case she could use the airline app on her phone to view them. Or you can send them all to you and then forward to your travel buddy, in which case her app may not automatically recognize that the email is her boarding pass and she would just use the email file to scan the bar code.

I think I did it both ways on different legs of our trip; it was a moot point since my husband refused to clutter up his phone with the app.
posted by aimedwander at 12:56 PM on May 11, 2015

What airline?
posted by AppleTurnover at 1:16 PM on May 11, 2015 [1 favorite]

If you have an iPhone, you can usually click "add to Passbook" from the airline apps, too. I used to think Passbook was dumb, but it makes retrieving the passes really easy and you could toggle between them pretty quickly.
posted by AgentRocket at 1:18 PM on May 11, 2015 [2 favorites]

With Delta, I've never had a problem inputting my own information and getting my own boarding pass. With business travel, it's often booked centrally so I think most of the majors would have apps that support such a thing.
posted by Medieval Maven at 1:18 PM on May 11, 2015

I've just taken pictures of my boarding pass before, so that there would be no issue with it failing to load. In theory, you could do this, so you'd have one image for you and one for your wife. (I took screenshots with the build in IOS home and sleep button screenshot feature).
posted by mercredi at 1:22 PM on May 11, 2015 [2 favorites]

I have done this. It was not a problem to scan my boarding pass and then tell security or the gate agent that I also had the boarding pass for my traveling partner. All I had to do was switch between them.
posted by Nackt at 1:57 PM on May 11, 2015 [1 favorite]

Email her a screenshot. It's easier than reloading the site on either of your phones.
posted by raspberrE at 3:38 PM on May 11, 2015

Turkish airlines gave me the option to sms them to different phones. I wouldn't stress too much, the airline will have a way of dealing with this.
posted by kjs4 at 4:31 PM on May 11, 2015

Best answer: I travel with my kids all the time via phone boarding passes. I typically use the Alaska Airlines iPhone app, which will show you all boarding passes associated with a single booking and single flight: you go to the flight information in the app, and after you've checked in, there's a button you can push that says boarding passes. Click on it, and you're presented with the first boarding pass; after they've scanned that at the gate/TSA checkpoint, you move your phone away from the scanner, swipe left, and the next boarding pass is revealed, up to as many travelers as you have boarding passes for that flight.

(Something similar works with passbook, but it's too many clicks to get the boarding passes into passbook, so often I just use the Alaska app instead.)
posted by leahwrenn at 5:27 PM on May 11, 2015

If you bought the tickets together, one person has the option to check both travelers in.

Just did this twice recently. Eeerily enough, you can also check in for the other persons pass with your credit card. Even if they bought the tickets with theirs and your name wasn't anywhere in the billing besides being on the ticket.

Panopticon, and whatnot.

Just go to the kiosk, check in with one phone, and print both passes. It'll let you do it instantly.
posted by emptythought at 7:35 PM on May 11, 2015

Response by poster: So, using the iPhone app from Alaska Airlines, my wife and I were each able to login into our respective phones and get the boarding pass for the specific person. That's even with each of us using my name as the account holder. Essentially, the app gives you the option to check-in for both or individually.

Thanks for the replies!
posted by grefo at 12:46 PM on June 11, 2015