
Redesigning the airport boarding pass (2010) - skanderbm
http://passfail.squarespace.com/
======
davemtl
Although this blog post is a few years old, I'd like to shed a little light
onto why boarding passes haven't changed in years.

To redesign the boarding pass, you have to understand how the data is
processed and presented. Often the terminals and printers are shared between
airlines, so there has to be a standard.

Each airline uses something called a PECTAB. This a basically a template that
has coordinates of where the data is to be printed (text & logo). It's loaded
on the printer each time the airline terminal application (such as Sabre,
Amadeaus, etc.) connects to the CUTE (Common Use Terminal Emulator, IATA
standard) API hosted on the computer which acts as a gateway to the printers,
OCR scanner, etc. Did I mention this is a shared terminal by several airlines
that have completely different applications? :)

A lot of the BTP (boarding pass) printers either use the older dot style
printing, but the newer thermal (GPP) printers are becoming more common
because they are cheaper to maintain.

Unfortunately, the terminal emulators and CUTE standard hasn't kept up to date
with the available technology, a lot airlines are still running on mainframes
from 25+ years ago.

~~~
tyingq
Great comment, and informative, but...

>a lot airlines are still running on mainframes from 25+ years ago

That's really not related to this topic at all. The TPF mainframes have little
to do with how the boarding pass looks. That functionality is in other
systems/code.

The TPF mainframe for most airlines at this point is just a big nosql
database, surrounded by a bunch of other systems that aren't old. If you
replaced it, the customer facing stuff wouldn't look or act much differently.

The sprawl of the applications around it, and the lack of consistency across
those is actually a bigger problem than the TPF mainframe.

------
ahmedfromtunis
I like that we are integrating more and more well designed products and
utilities in our day to day life; beautiful, easy to use objects are no longer
a luxury. That by itself is a glorious win.

People, however, tend to forget the old but gold adage: "Form follows
Functionality". I mean, this talented designer ventured into poking fun of the
work of other people without even taking the time to understand the problem,
the proposed solution, and the constraints that were/are in place.

Yes, his design is infinitely more good looking. But did the designer took
into consideration how applicable is it in the real world, with real logistics
and real business scenarios? No. Of course he didn't.

The reason I'm saying this is because I suffer those atrocities every day in
my work, were I'm tasked with the coordination between journalists and
designers for a business magazine.

Where I work, we believe that infographics' main mission is to help readers
wrap their heads around things they wouldn't if we presented them as text or
tables. That's the point of them being there in the first place. Making them
pretty is just a way to make people look at them, and be happy while they
learn something new. It is so satisfying to create such pieces.

Designers, however, seem to discard all of that, caring only about how trendy
the damn gradient is. I was even called ignorant and 'noob' by a designer, one
that I fought to recruit a week earlier, because I suggested making numbers
readable, something he deemed old-fashioned and would ruin his master-fucking-
piece.

I really hope that people will be more aware that design is not a goal by
itself; it's a tool to make people care, learn and be more happy.

Edit: OMGrammar!

~~~
et-al
> Designers, however, seem to discard all of that, caring only about how
> trendy the damn gradient is. I was even called ignorant and 'noob' by a
> designer, one that I fought to recruit a week earlier, because I suggested
> making numbers readable, something he deemed old-fashioned and would ruin
> his master-fucking-piece.

I suspect a lot of designers are really just designing for dribbble/Behance
portfolios so they can finally climb the ladder to Art Director.

~~~
kevin_thibedeau
Now you have a scenario to screen the next designer you interview.

------
manigandham
I find the tall skinny letters are much harder to read and random elements
like the country map just add clutter. Giant color backgrounds are also
distracting and probably make printing more expensive while lowering quality
for people who print passes at home.

Overall I prefer existing boarding passes, which aren't actually that
complicated these days. Also many people now use digital passes on their
mobile phones that are much easier to use with built-in intelligence and real-
time updates.

------
jerkstate
I think the new design is worse than the old design. Not a fan of the narrow
font, crowding, and tiny labels (following, not leading, the numbers) for
category. Am I flying from gate 22A in seat 11B or vice versa?

The labels for what the number IS should be nearly the same size as the number
itself.

The departure time is listed, but the boarding time is not. The boarding time
is more critical to know.

~~~
howderek
I totally agree. The text was hard to read. I thought that Timoni West's
design was much better than what exists today, however.

------
agwa
A far better attempt at redesigning the boarding pass was done by Timoni West:

[http://blog.timoni.org/post/318322031/a-practical-
boarding-p...](http://blog.timoni.org/post/318322031/a-practical-boarding-
pass-redesign)

Unlike the author of this post, West actually endeavored to understand the
constraints and requirements before undertaking a redesign. That's the mark of
a truly competent designer.

~~~
soared
This is listed at the end of the author's page fyi, he lists a bunch of other
people's designs.

------
Pxtl
I dislike his redesign, because most of what he does is fix the fact that it's
ugly. Large-printing the numbers is pointless when the labels are still teeny-
tiny and the layout of the tearable stub doesn't match so it's non-obvious
that it contains the same info.

Imho, the tearaway should clearly repeat the layout of the big one so the
reader can see "this is the same".

I'd sort the data in order. Putting the zone at the end is wrong because you
don't use it after the seat. First you need flight number and time, then you
gate days where to go, then your zone says where to go, then your seat says
where to go. It seems obvious to sort the data like that.

~~~
et-al
> I'd sort the data in order.

Yeah, I liked Julian Montoya's design the most because its vertical layout
immediately conveys a hierarchy of data (though the gate number is omitted).
The other designs, while aesthetically novel, required my eyes to jump around
to gleam meaningful information.

~~~
Pxtl
My problem with Montoya's design is that he used 3 letter abbreviations for
the cities... You need the full name. 3 letter airport abbreviations are
jargon that should not be the core of user-facing interaction.

~~~
dx034
They can be important. It's important to know if you're flying to LHR or LGW
(for London), esp if you're at an airport where planes of the same airline
leave to both. Identifying the flight by flight number is often problematic if
it's a codeshare flight (displays at the airport only show one or switch
infrequently), so identifying by airport and flight time is easier.

------
tyingq
One thing that these types of articles tend to overlook is consistency across
the different types of boarding passes.

You have home printed boarding passes that will be printed on all sorts of
awful printers, with bad settings (like printing color to a b/w printer) and
poor resolution.

Then, some will be printed on thermal printers at airports, and some on
airport controlled thermal printers, some on airline controlled thermal
printers. Different models, with different stock, etc.

Finally, the mobile boarding passes.

The employees checking these do better if there's some uniformity across the
various formats. Similar for customers.

So, there is a bit of "lowest common denominator" in the current designs. It's
on purpose.

~~~
Nullabillity
Meh, the employees will just scan the barcode and look at their computer
anyway.

~~~
tyingq
The gate agent can do that. Flight attendants can't. Same for the ticket
counter.

~~~
Nullabillity
I guess that depends on where you're flying from. The only airport in the last
couple of years where I've even had a boarding pass was RIX, otherwise it's
always just stored on the frequent flier card.

------
zkms
The paper itself is another problem with modern boarding passes. I miss the
old-style boarding passes (the kind you'd find a magnetic strip on), when they
were printed on thick cardstock (that wouldn't rip if you put them in a pocket
or in between the pages of your passport) and not the thin and squicky BPA-
infused thermal paper that almost rips on its own.

~~~
dnh44
I still get the thick card stock ones fairly often I think it just depends
what airport and airline maybe.

------
kwhitefoot
What for?

I mean why do you need one? Most of the flights I take in Scandinavia don't
have boarding passes I just use the credit card I used to buy the ticket. If a
boarding pass is needed I can get it in the form of a QR code on my mobile
when I check in online.

~~~
jayshua
I personally avoid the mobile app. I have no data plan on my phone, and
airport WiFi is not exactly known as the best (or safest). I also have this
(probably unfounded) fear of my battery failing and having to go through a
bunch of extra effort to get a printed one anyway.

~~~
kornakiewicz
I always make a screenshot of mobile boarding card, plus additional one with
full-size QR code. Or just keep one as pdf.

------
icebraining
It's interesting that the pass has the boarding gate printed on it. I've only
flown in Europe (and only started around six years ago), but the gates are
available only half-hour or so from the closing time. Is it common in the US
to know the gate in advance?

~~~
marcoperaza
Almost always. It's nice because the terminals can be rather large and if
you're going to grab a meal prior to departure, you'd want to go to a
restaurant that is near the departure gate. Also, different gates used by the
same airline are sometimes in totally disjoint post-security areas. Are these
things not problems in Europe?

~~~
Symbiote
Europe has airports ranging from some of the world's biggest (LHR, CDG) to
some of the smallest.

At some airports, all flights will be international (e.g. Shannon). At others,
all flights will be domestic or within Schengen.

Some airports are almost entirely used by budget airlines (London Luton),
others have very few budget airline flights (London Heathrow).

That leaves plenty of flexibility for how the airport is operated. I'd expect
a gate printed on the boarding pass as the larger airports with longer, non-EU
flights. I'm not surprised when a Ryanair flight only announces the gate a
short time before departure, since they have such a short turn-around time
everything seems to be last-minute.

~~~
marcoperaza
Makes sense.

------
cbhl
The main issue I have with this design is that it doesn't account for the cost
of implementing the proposed changes.

For paper boarding passes, it's prohibitively expensive to upgrade the
printers and self-check-in kiosks to support new-fangled boarding pass
layouts. Plus, you have to do it at every airport around the world.

It would be far cheaper to have some professionally printed full-color paper
templates to feed into the printers (see, for example, Virgin America boarding
passes issued at SFO).

Plus, iPhone Passbook tickets are uniformly designed, and have the key
information (seat number, boarding time) in slightly bigger bold font at the
top. It would be far cheaper to get an airline to install eTicket readers (aka
QR code scanners) at the few small airports that don't have them, and then to
upgrade their mobile apps to support generating Apple Passbook boarding passes
for the remaining ticket types that don't work (e.g. group fares).

------
chx
Let's look at this from a tired traveler perspective. Not sure whether you had
the joy of being on the other end of a transoceanic flight but typically by
that time you have been up for too long, stressed from packing, passing
security, immigration then sitting 10-12-16 hours in an overpressurized dry
aluminium tube.

Your brain wants to shut down. You are staring at this piece of paper which
has the flight number, the gate number and the seat number in roughly the same
size, the same font and in every which way visually the same.

I did get dangerously close to mixing up my gate with my seat. More than once.
It's an atrociously bad design.

And it's not that hard to improve. All it needs is more folds. First fold,
flight / gate. You don't give a shit about seat so hide it. This doesn't
require new printers , new standards or shit. Just one more fold in the paper.
Is that so hard?

------
deathanatos
As someone with a suffix in their name, I'd like if the name portion could
just stop corrupting my name. IIRC, the last airline took:

    
    
      First Name: John
      Middle Initial: Q
      Last Name: Smith
      Suffix: III
    

as input ( _in separate fields!_ , and in the above order) and printed that
as:

    
    
      JOHNIII SMITH Q
    

Note the lack of space separating the given name and the suffix, the odd
positioning and ordering of _all_ of the elements of the name…. This is
nowhere close to how its represented on my legal ID, and I've never in my life
written my name that way.

Then you take this boarding pass to security, where a TSA agent squints at it
thinking to himself "this is definitely fake", until the barcode scans and it
comes back as good.

------
noonespecial
_> This is the actual boarding pass I got from Delta. It's a nightmare. Note
all the random alignments and spacing issues._

What on earth made him assume that these alignments and spaces were random? I
bet the scanners that read them think they're gorgeous.

------
oliv__
The first thing I couldn't help but notice was how much _ink_ these new
designs would use! That seems like a major design flaw for an industry with
such tight margins.

~~~
huac
Plus, white on black gives a dope contrast but that's real expensive to print
at scale.

------
soared
Thoughts on having one "website" for a blog post? I think its kind of cool -
gives more weight to the post. But it definitely creates a disconnect between
the author and the post.. I can't navigate to the author's site for other
work, or to find this blog post again, etc.

------
amelius
Can't we get rid of the boarding pass altogether?

I mean, I'm always carrying two things around the airport: my passport and the
boarding pass.

I think this can be reduced to one thing: just my passport, by letting the
airport deal with boarding electronically.

~~~
icelancer
>I think this can be reduced to one thing: just my passport, by letting the
airport deal with boarding electronically.

What if you don't have a passport? Add a smartphone dependency?

~~~
eh78ssxv2f
credit card? driving license?

~~~
saryant
Not everyone is flying on a ticket they paid for.

And children don't have drivers licenses.

------
ricardobeat
This is the boarding pass for the last flight I took:
[https://s1.postimg.org/7z1w2wwm7/IMG_0048.jpg](https://s1.postimg.org/7z1w2wwm7/IMG_0048.jpg)

It has some of the changes seen in his redesign, but still a lot closer to the
original one from Delta. I think it's perfectly fine and practical, despite
not being exactly visually pleasant; all the information I care about is in
big bold letters at the top, without any strange codes or abbreviations.

------
tigereyeTO
It's great that so much thought has been put into the design that is printed
on boarding passes, but one thing that's always bothered me about them is the
physical size.

Every passport is the same size, and you almost always are carrying your
passport while flying.

If boarding passes were the same size as passports, they'd fit inside much
more easily and make it a lot more convenient to carry.

Sure, the design printed on the paper is important too, but IMHO the size of
the pass is far more important!

~~~
closeparen
>you almost always are carrying your passport while flying.

What? Flying internationally is a rare event even for rich people (business
travelers excepted). Most of us will do it a handful of times, or not at all.
I'd estimate the vast majority of flights to be domestic. You just use the
photo ID that's already in your wallet.

If you don't want to carry an additional object, just put it in Passbook on
your phone using the airline's app.

------
Taniwha
There's a purely practical thing that these need to deal with: sometimes when
you board you hand over the end stub and keep the large portion, and sometimes
you hand over the large portion and are given the stub .... This means that
all (or enough) information needs to be on both bits .... You can't just put
the seat number on one bit (or the flight number on one bit, as you may need
it for customs forms later) etc etc

------
usaphp
I like it, I think it's more readable compared to the one that they show as a
current one on the top. It took me a while to find a departure time and gate
number on the original boarding pass. All the important pieces like flight
number, seat and departure time are really easy to read compared to the
original.

The problem on the original is that they don't emphasize the important
information pieces, all is printed in the same font style and size.

~~~
dieselz
I really dislike comments that are negative about design when someone has
spent a lot of time researching the problem and the commenter has not. With
that said, here is me doing that exact thing:

I agree with usaphp. With equal visual hierarchy, it's dismissing the fact
that you care about some items 0% of the time and some items 100% of the time.
And this difference between these states can change in minutes. For example, I
don't care at all what my seat assignment is until I'm on the plane. I don't
care at all what zone I'm boarding until I'm at the gate. I don't care at all
what gate it says because gates change all the time. Even if I used mobile
kiosk for check-in and it gives me a gate, there's a non-trivial chance that
by the time I get to the terminal, that gate has changed. I do not rely on the
gate assignment on my boarding pass, ever.

Similar items are not grouped when they should be: such as boarding time and
gate.

And the font is not glance-able. It's a nice font that takes little width, but
unless they start changing code share codes to "DL50,381,172", there's a ton
of extra space that could be used. (of course whitespace is valuable too, but
squishing information together for the sake of squishing it together is not a
wise design decision.

Regarding someone's comment about color/shitty printers - this kind of design
would require two designs: one b/w and one color. The strength of the reds and
blues would take over the important information.

------
lathiat
Meanwhile for Qantas in Australia on domestic flights, you just tap your
frequent flyer card to check-in and scan it's barcode at the gate to board. It
does print a small slip with your seat allocation on it at that point though.

Now someone just has to build e-Ink into the card.. which I know has at least
partly been done by some of those virtual credit card startups.

------
ginko
I know KLM recently introduced boarding documents you can print and fold four-
ways so that it was pretty much the size of your passport and if you have a
two-flight connection there would be one on each side. The overall details are
pretty well laid out as well.

I'd post an example, but the only one I have is my own boarding pass, so
that's not really an option.

~~~
joe5150
Virgin America's are similar[1] and I really liked the way they did it.

1: [https://www.subtraction.com/2014/10/13/virgin-america-
boardi...](https://www.subtraction.com/2014/10/13/virgin-america-boarding-
pass/)

------
techbubble
I wish someone would add the departure time (origin TZ), flight duration,
arrival time (origin TZ) and arrival time (destination TZ).

~~~
robaato
Amen brother. I often ring to get a taxi to meet me at the arrival - with
current design I have to look it up separately as opposed to on boarding
pass... Also an indication of predicted flight time is really useful (even if
subject to change because valid at time printed).

------
Exuma
The design is worse to me. Black background for reading is a bad idea, and
there's a lot of things competing for attention because everything is so big.
They could do with better font too... way too hard to read and thin.

White background + gotham font + white background + proper spacing + a splash
of color = win

------
mattmurdog
"So I took out my Moleskine and started sketching."

You lost me with your hipster pretentiousness.

------
tomjn
I really like the human text design, it's the only one that's a real
improvement and easy to process.

I feel a lot of the others are swapping practicality for looking like an
infrographic, prettier but just as difficult to process

------
mbrookes
This article is from 2010. The "designer"* loses credibility for not having a
date on his blog post (at least the boarding cards have that).

*Using a bigger typeface is "design"?!

------
aembleton
Why don't you just use an app that displays the barcode? It's been a while
since I've boarded a flight using a paper ticket.

~~~
techbubble
If you have checked luggage, they print boarding passes for you and stick the
baggage tag labels on the pass. At that point you have a paper pass so using
the mobile one doesn't make much sense.

Also, if you are traveling internationally, the boarding pass is mandatory for
the various security and immigration stamps.

------
arcticbull
It's interesting that since 2008, almost a decade ago, basically nothing has
changed with respect to boarding pass layout and design.

~~~
icebraining
For reference, here's Ryanair's current paper boarding pass:
[http://travelupdate.boardingarea.com/wp-
content/uploads/2017...](http://travelupdate.boardingarea.com/wp-
content/uploads/2017/01/RyanairQuad2.jpg)

I find it quite usable.

------
1_2__4
Title should include date for a 2010 blog post.

------
DerSaidin
I'd like for boarding passes to fit in my passport without folding them or
hanging out.

------
ada1981
Apple Wallet does a pretty good job of displaying boarding passes.

No ink, no paper, and easy for me to read.

------
sneak
ffs stop using 12h time

------
Principe
Boarding passes used to be on glossy cardstock with preprinted designs and
lots of color. Now they're basically thermal printed on receipt paper because
it's cheaper.

Depending on your airline and class of travel, sometimes you can still get a
nice boarding pass.

------
pinaceae
this is so old (2008, with updates till 2010).

why is this up again?

must have been on HN multiple times now.

~~~
hk__2
> must have been on HN multiple times now.

It has been posted 8 years ago [1], then again twice 7 years ago [2,3], then 3
years ago [4].

    
    
        [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1029181
        [2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1278476
        [3]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1549613
        [4]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7791097

------
justicezyx
Designer should understand that boarding pass at today, should no longer be
designed, instead, software should be written to handle those things
automatically.

The technology to automate boarding is already there and are very mature.

~~~
martin-adams
Not sure I fully understand what you're concluding. If it's handled
automatically, how do you get the passengers at the right gate, at the right
time and in the right seat?

~~~
justicezyx
Google now already can infer those information from emails.

Just pass a UID of the ticket information, and any decent software company and
given you phone app that automate _everything_...

~~~
martin-adams
Right, so essentially pushing the presentation of information to third
parties. I understand what you mean now, thank you.

