Qantas Apple Watch doesn’t fit under Qantas boarding pass scanners
Lots of airlines have rushed to have their apps working on the Apple Watch on launch day.
One of the highlighted features of the watch is its ability to sync with an iPhone’s Passbook app, displaying a user’s credit cards and boarding passes easily on the wrist.
Qantas, however, has been facing a bit of a sizing issue with the watch with users pointing out since the wearable’s launch that a wrist wearing the Apple Watch simply doesn’t fit under the gate scanner for boarding passes.
Qantas’s app generates an individual QR code to the Passbook app for users boarding a flight. While the scanners were initially designed for simple paper barcodes before smartphone apps came about, they were able to handle scanning the QR code from an iPhone or other smartphone.
Now, with the introduction of the Apple Watch, Qantas’s scanners face the hurdle of being unable to accommodate an entire wrist along with the Apple Watch.
Qantas has acknowledged the problem on Twitter.
@taufiqz Hi Taufiq, currently we’re unable to scan boarding passes from the Apple watch, our team are aware of this and assessing. Kristyn
The introduction of a smaller, more handheld scanner could alleviate the issue, but would undoubtedly be extremely costly to introduce in every airport the airline supports. Given that the Qantas app includes a host of other features besides supporting Apple Watch, from boarding times, departure gates, and delays, the company could also decide to leave the QR code functionality solely to the iPhone and introduce the Apple Watch’s Qantas app as more of a companion experience.
Perhaps airlines should look to make existing stuff work better rather than spend time and money playing around with a new service that will be used by, at least at first, by a really tiny number of their passengers.
