Many airlines now push for us to use our phone for check-in and use as little paper as possible. Even hotel and car bookings can all be done electronically – give them your email address – get your booking information, time and date and pickup, how long you are staying, is there a pool in the hotel, etc, etc, etc.
All this push to do everything electronically.
Sometimes I am not the person booking my own travel, if we travel in a group someone is nominated to get us a group rate or if it’s bundled with a conference, someone handle’s that so they know what is happening and sometimes I am just bad at it and not always on the lookout for the best deal – so it all comes to me electronically. And sometimes I get very busy that I leave it all in my phone and might not pull it out until I need it the most.
Enter customs.
While waiting in line at an airport (not going to say which one), everyone was asked to shut down all their devices while we were waiting upwards of 30 minutes. I didn’t mind the wait, I had tons of great reading material to catch up on. What did strike me as odd was that all my information for my trip was on my phone and I wouldn’t be able to tell the customs agent where I was going.
Should I have read it sooner? Maybe, but I am allowed to be in a rush no?
Should I have printed it out to have it advance with me? Maybe, but that also defeat’s the purpose of saving trees?
Should I be able to show my bookings to customs from my phone so they can see where I am going along with my complete conference schedule, where I am staying, what booking number I am in, etc all from one view? Perhaps from one view that they define and create as an application or something?
Now we’re trying to solve a problem – the problem of the customer trying to dance between two incompatible implementations.
