Bar-Coded Boarding Passes (BCBP) Implementation guide - IATA

7. MEDIA USED AS BOARDING PASSES
The airline industry has decided to use the BCBP standard for 100% of the boarding passes. The
BCBP standard is about boarding data: it enables other technologies to leverage on the data.
Airlines may decide to use other media as boarding passes. This does not interfere with the
100% BCBP mandate because the scope of BCBP is the boarding passes issued by airlines, as
opposed to the media belonging to the customers and used as a pass.
Passenger
Media
Technology
Media Maturity
Technology
Maturity
Mobile phone NFC Medium Medium
Iris or fingerprint Biometrics Medium Medium
E-passport RFID Medium Medium
Notes on maturity:
Low: Trial stage
Medium: Used by early adopters
High: Mainstream
7.1. Mobile phones (NFC)
The concept of mobile Radio Frequency (RF) boarding pass is similar to BCBP or ATB, except
that the data is stored in a chip. RF is a mature technology, for example for personal access
control. Initiatives such as the Near Field Communication (NFC) technology aim at developing
contact-less identification into mobile phones.
Airlines such as Japan Airlines provide IC Card readers on their check-in kiosks (see fig. 66)
Figure 68 - Kiosk embedded 2D bar code scanner and IC card reader courtesy of JAL
The IATA Resolution 791 ‘Specifications for airline industry integrated circuit card (ICC) – version
03’ defines the use of ICC or smart cards. The purpose of Resolution 791 is to support interline
ET. The data contains an element called ‘Boarding data’ of length 60, which is not sufficient to
include the BCBP data. The current ICC standard cannot support the BCBP standard (see fig.
67).
4 th edition - June 2009 - www.iata.org/stb/bcbp 81/128