Meet the New Billboard: Airline Boarding Passes
Major carriers are launching a new money-making scheme that I approve of: ads on boarding passes. As the Wall Street Journal reported yesterday, Delta has already added promotional messages, coupons and destination-based travel information like weather reports to some boarding passes and at least four other airlines (Continental, United, Northwest, US Airways) have partnered with the company producing the ads and expect to roll out the new boarding passes within the year.
Sure, some people will probably decry the presence of yet more advertising images in their everyday lives, but the airlines clearly need to find new revenue streams - and this one arguably benefits some travelers - and it certainly doesn’t take anything away.
Tags: Air Travel, airline news, airlines, boarding pass, boarding pass ads
July 16th, 2008 at 4:31 pm
Actually, InkJet ink isn’t super cheap, and I print a lot of boarding passes. It especially annoys me when the boarding pass slips on to a second page because of an in-line advertisement (such as the one on the American Airlines boarding pass). But I guess if it will help them not go out of business I’m fine with it. Maybe as a compromise they could use ads that have light-colored or greyscale images to conserve ink.