Wearable Boarding Experience when flying with SAA

I recently had to fly to South Africa and used SAA for this journey. I am not going to talk about the customer service or how the flight went. This is about my experience using an Omate TrueSmart watch to board the aircraft.

You could ask why I would try and board an aircraft using my watch. My answer is simple. I am wearing it, therefore I don’t need to pull a boarding pass out of my pocket or use one of my hands to hold it. Or because I can. But I have been working with computers long enough to know that you must always have a backup. I also printed out my boarding pass in case the watch failed in any way.

The Omate TrueSmart watch is a very nice Android JellyBean watch that was launched using a KickStarter campaign (https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/omate/omate-truesmart-water-resistant-standalone-smartwa). The biggest issue that I have is its battery life which in my opinion is far too short for people who travel.

I installed an application from the Google Play Store called PassWallet (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.attidomobile.passwallet). This application can accept Passbook (.pkpass) files. I selected the option to receive my boarding pass as a Passbook file when I checked in online for the SAA flight. When I received the email on my watch, I opened the attachment and PassWallet immediately imported the file as shown in the picture.

At London Heathrow (Terminal 1), I passed through security using my watch. The document checking gates scanned the barcode immediately.

Boarding the aircraft took a bit more effort as they had to check my passport. They insisted on writing on my boarding pass that they had checked my passport. As I was boarding with a mobile device (phones will also have this issue), they couldn’t just scribble on my watch. For this step I had to produce my home printed boarding pass that I brought as a backup for them to scribble on. But once I got to the gate itself, the watch scanned immediately without an issue.

I really enjoyed using my watch to board the plane. I have previously boarded a plane using my 3G kindle (paper based) at JFK. But I much prefer using my watch to board the plane because it is something that I already have on me and I don’t have to carry a paper boarding pass. The only issues that I experienced when flying from London Heathrow were based on the fact that the procedures used by SAA at Heathrow do not match the functionality that they offer to their customers. If you offer a mobile boarding solution, then your procedures should allow for this eventuality.

I will definitely do this again given the opportunity.