MSNBC.com reported today that the majors in the airline industry will allow travelers to use bar codes sent to their cell phones to check in. It was reported that, “Passengers will register their cell-phone number when buying a ticket and receive a bar code by text message.” This would be shown at check-in time (yep, hold up the phone with the bar code) and they would scan the bar code directly from the cell phones screen, doing away with the need for an airline provided paper boarding pass. This should help in their efforts to phase out paper tickets by 2010.

Cool.

Now, one question that comes to mind AISI; will this be sent as an image as it is a bar code? If so, doesn’t that mean people would have to have pix ability along with their text ability? Not all people who have text ability have pix ability as it is normally an additional fee, so we wonder how this will work?

P.S. – for those of you not up on TXTn, you could also receive the bar code by e-mail and print it out & bring that to be scanned.