Out'n About Travel-Boarding Passes!-A full service bilingual travel agency

04 Jan Boarding Passes!

Posted at 19:32h in Travel Tips by lynne@outnabouttravel.com 1 Comment

Do you hold onto your boarding passes while in transit?

Here’s a true story from one of our clients, a seasoned traveller who just recently travelled back to Canada from the US. They were travelling from Phoenix to Calgary and on to Winnipeg.

“So we arrived in Calgary, and cleared customs.We proceeded down the hallway to “connections”…. They scanned our ongoing boarding passes.

THEN: demanded our boarding passes from the prior flight…. no pass, no proceed

Mine was in the garbage. I put my bag tags in my passport. I check that my frequent flyer number is correct and then I discard the boarding pass while onboard the flight. There was no arguing with the woman, pointing out there was nowhere else I could have come from.

I asked her to check with the customs officer… nope. She made a phone call.. to who I do not know… and put me in the “sin bin”. To stand and look at her looking at her phone.

Then the customs agent came, and let me go back (now with 4 other travellers in tow) to the West Jet arrivals desk. The agent there was supposed to reprint our old passes. Nope… the WestJet agents can’t do that. The agent came back with us to the lady in the red jacket… no amount of reassurance that we came off a plane would work.

The eventual solution was to reopen a ‘special screening lane” for all of us to go through security screening again.

A traveller’s nightmare. I made my flight. I suspect others did not.

So… long story short… tell ALL of your customers to retain ALL boarding passes until they get back home.

Oh.. and we had a great trip!!”

Have you had similar experiences?