If you have been bothered by all the ugly ink coming from your Boarding Pass to your shirt pocket right before you take off for that important meeting, don’t worry anymore, at least when you are flying from Mumbai. Mumbai Airport Boarding Pass Stamping is going away.
Mumbai Airport is soon going to roll out a new process, which they claim is a part of the DigiYatra initiative of the Government of India, where you no longer need your Boarding Pass stamped for domestic flights for airlines operating from Mumbai’s Terminal 2.
Passengers travelling within the country from Terminal 2 will be now able to authenticate their boarding pass at the pre-embarkation security checkpoint by scanning the boarding pass barcode or QRCode on their mobile phones at the e-gate reader using the live passenger dataset.
To decode the jargon for you, from the last time I was at the domestic terminal 2 of Mumbai Airport, I noticed that people now had to scan their boarding passes to get access to the Level 3 of the airport, but the stamping was still ongoing at the end of December when I last travelled from there.
When you use the barcodes on your boarding passes to access the terminal area, it tells the airport that you are now on your way to board the flight since after crossing over, there is no way you can walk back out unless there is a good reason to be out. Earlier, the security forces would manually check your eligibility to go to the level, and it was not recorded anywhere.
Once you get access, the security screening will now only stall people where there is a problem, otherwise, they will do a frisking and have you on your way to the gate. Mumbai Airport has not clarified if they will also have another stage of clearance at this level as the Hyderabad Airport does.
The boarding pass stamping is only going away for Terminal 2 Domestic at the moment, but Mumbai Airport is also saying they will introduce this at Terminal 1 as well sometime soon.
Have you flown through Mumbai Airport Terminal 2 recently? Have you noticed the stop on Boarding pass stamping yet?
Does this mean, we no longer have to carry printed boarding passes? Finally the Jet Airways mobile boarding pass can be put to use.
My last experience at Hyderabad airport, where one can scan boarding passes off their smartphones, the infrared readers have to be turned up to the highest notch to read the barcode off the screen.