Jaunted

As USAToday notes, this self-boarding procedure has been in place at European airports for a while now and it's main point is to free up gate agents for other tasks and for addressing any issues. We actually just went through a few of these self-boarding gates recently in Germany, and we love them. Using a mobile boarding pass on our iPhone, we placed the phone down onto a little scanner at the turnstile and we were right through. However, there was a line for passengers who preferred to give their boarding pass over to a live person (and of course we flew past it).

Since we're comfortable with technology and we didn't have any seating issues or questions, the self-boarding gate was a miracle made in German airport heaven. And now the US finally gets to experience it. Here is a photo of a Lufthansa self-boarding gate, almost exactly like the ones with which we're familiar in Europe.

In our opinion, airport money would be better spent on these self-boarding kiosk than on full-body scanners, but people will be scared of the technology no matter what. What is important to note here however, is that moving to the self-boarding machines means that boarding passes will have to carry barcodes, which contain more passenger information than magnetic strips. There's the security benefit right there.

[Photo: bitchcakesny]