Credit Cards == ID
Jun 30th, 2009 by sherri
Saw this sign in the Baltimore airport last week:
“Self-Service Check-In: You Will Need a Major Credit Card”
and then in small print:
“For Identification Only”
Yes, apparently American Airlines will only give boarding passes to individuals who have been thoroughly vetted according to the strict standards of American Express, Mastercard, or VISA (and perhaps Discover).
| Sherri Davidoff |
| PGP-signed text: 2009-07-01 (current) |
I think that’s a little unfair. I’m not sure if your complaint is “AA is requiring people to show them your credit card, which should be private” or “AA is trusting the name on a credit card to decide to print out tickets”. In the former case, it’s only required for self-service checkin, which isn’t the only way to check in (right?). In the latter case, most airport self-service kiosks require far less than that: the ones I’ve used often let you get away with typing your last name and the city you’re flying to. If I know you’re flying today, I can almost certainly get your boarding pass in my hands without doing anything nearly as complicated as forging a credit card. (You might even be officially allowed to pick up tickets for other people… I’m not sure.)
In theory the ID check (if we pretend that it means anything security-wise anyway) is the check between your government ID and the boarding pass at security, not anything that happens when you receive your boarding pass.
I do feel kind of disgusting defending anything about airlines, though.
I just think it’s interesting that they’ve conflated “credit cards” – a form of payment- with “identification.” Major credit card companies, at least in the US, mail out cards with your name encoded on them, and never verify your identity in person. This is part of why identity theft is such an annoying problem.
>If I know you’re flying today, I can almost certainly get your boarding >pass in my hands without doing anything nearly as complicated as
Yup, completely agreed. I think that’s good– I really don’t think that getting on an airplane should be a big deal. Just tired of the security theater.
That’s actually a badly worded sign. In reality the self-check in machines will work without a credit card. If you slide a credit card in, it will read your name from the mag stripe and then attempt to look up your reservation using that name. It’s faster if you use an AA Frequent flyer card, as it matches straight to your FF#.
If you want to check a bag, you still have to present a photo id to the ticket agent. And of course you still have to get through TSA security with a gov id.
Yeah, I mostly figure the logic is “these machines already take credit cards so that you can pay for upgrades and extra bags and the like, and hey, scanning a card is faster than typing on a screen”.
Yep. Perhaps I should clarify that this post was intended as a commentary on the wording of the sign, and not on the actual check-in process (which it doesn’t appropriately describe).
I have used my Discover card for this purpose at NWA check-in stations.