Travel Delays

Took a trip recently and was quite surprised at some advances in technology when traveling. Usually when I travel, I print out my boarding passes before I hit the road and then have to struggle with getting them printed for the return journey. Easy if you are near a computer or staying in a hotel with a decent business center but a pain if you are out on your own. So I downloaded the Delta App to my iPhone to see how well it works and I am surprised as to how easy it goes. 
Traveling to Richmond I missed my connection in Atlanta and the good news there is that if you need to miss a connection someplace, Atlanta is the place to do it. They have so many flights out of Atlanta, you can almost always be assured of getting a connection without losing too much time. Get off the plane, they send you to a kiosk that scans your boarding pass, and then automatically prints out a new pass for the new flight that the system puts you on. That is it.  No long lines, no waiting, no contact with a human. Good news is that they have made it so easy for this kind of problem; bad news is that they have so many people missing flights that they have to develop such a system. Now I am not sure how well this would have worked if I needed to change airlines because of the missed flight but one thing I do know, if I had been traveling Southwest, I would have had to wait for the next Southwest flight and not gotten a seat on another airline because they don’t do that. Was quite irritated with them when I missed a connection going up to New England and had to miss an entire day.

Back to the App. Getting ready for the return, a popup on my phone tells me it is time to check in, swipe it and it is done. Boarding pass appears on the phone and what is even nicer is that I don’t even have to log into my phone to show it on the screen when I go through security or board the jet. When it came time to travel back through Atlanta, a popup comes up to tell me the gate had changed. A nice application of technology.