I normally print our boarding passes online, a few hours before a flight somewhere. That gives me a chance to take advantage of last minute upgrades, change our seats to better ones if available, and print a couple duplicate copies in case our originals get lost.
It’s the RETURN flight, when I don’t have my computer that I have to depend on business centers or airport kiosks for our boarding passes. I prefer to have our boarding passes in hand when we get to the airport, and since we usually travel with only one carry-on for the two of us and no checked luggage, we usually can bypass long lines at the ticket counter.
This past holiday I finally decided to try one of the “print your boarding pass” machines in the hotel lobby instead of going to the business center to do our Web check-in. The cost was $1/printed page, $.35/minute and/or $5.95/credit card.
I inserted my AmEx, was charged $5.95, and then searched through the long list of airlines to find USAir. The first thing I noticed was that the computer used a rollerball instead of a mouse which made maneuvering slower for me than normal. I finally logged in to USAir and retrieved our reservations. I’d usually check our seat assignments but because I was having trouble using the rollerball, I clicked “print” instead.
A new window popped up and asked me if I was authorizing a payment of $5 for the 5 pages I was printing. I moused over to “yes” and clicked. Nothing. I clicked again.
A new window popped up with a message: “You only have $4.98 left, insert cash or use credit card…” By that time, however, the $4.98 was no longer a valid balance because with each second another penny was gone from the original $5.95 charged to my credit card.
So I put my credit card back in the slot but this time nothing happened. Only the cash slot kept flashing for my paper money. All well and good except I didn’t have any $1’s or $5’s with me and putting anything larger in was not an option since the machine “does not dispense change.”
My $5.95 continued to go down and was around $1.35 by the time I cancelled out of USAir’s site. Because I had attempted to print the passes, USAir’s site assumed I had successfully checked in. Later in the day, at the business center, I printed duplicate boarding passes.
Page 5 was nothing more than a paragraph about airline regulations. In retrospect, if I’d known what each page consisted of, I’d have tried to print the first four pages and my $4.98 should have been enough. Actually, in retrospect, I’d have kept a few $1 bills in my pocket, “just in case.”
Would I use one of these machines again? Probably not. But, now I know how they work and I’m hoping that my experience will save just one other person from wasting $5.95 like I did.