• by Erik Sass , Staff Writer @eriksass1, March 13, 2015

I freely admit to being a Luddite, but there’s one thing I’m definitely not going to miss: paper boarding passes. They’re too big to put in my wallet and too stiff to fold anyway, so I end up putting them in an easily accessible pocket to produce them quickly in security -- but then I always forget which pocket, prompting the TSA employee to arch an eyebrow as I give myself the frantic pat-down like an absent-minded professor. Is he a nervous terrorist, or just an excitable dimwit? Then when I have to make a connection, the gate information on subsequent boarding passes is often incorrect. Then I lose them again. In short: hate.

Happily for people like me, boarding passes are about to take off (get it?) according to a new forecast from Juniper Research, which predicts that 1.5 billion boarding passes will be distributed via mobile devices by 2019. That will be about a third of all boarding passes issued in the U.S., and more than twice this year’s predicted total of 745 million mobile boarding passes. A large part of this increase will be due to more leisure travelers using them; frequent business flyers have been the early adopters.

In keeping with this forecast, more airlines will offer mobile boarding passes in coming years. transportation IT analyst SITA predicts the proportion of airlines with mobile boarding to increase from 53% this year to 91% in 2017. The list of carriers already offering mobile boarding services includes American Airlines, Delta, JetBlue, Southwest, and United. Currently the most popular delivery method for delivering mobile boarding passes is scannable mobile barcodes, but Juniper expects NFC to gain market share, albeit gradually due to the lack of airline industry standards for implementing this tech.

The rise of mobile boarding passes opens up a whole new arena for mobile marketing. Mobile passes can  be tied in with a variety of airport-based media including place-based video and billboards, airplane WiFi and seatback video channels, and even good old-fashioned print media in the form of in-flight magazines (not to mention ads in security bins and on cocktail napkins).