Online check-in

The past 20 years has seen a great number of changes in air travel - it's unrecognisable from the 1980s, really. One of the changes has been the introduction of "on-line check-in", where, 24 hours before your flight is due to depart, you can go to the airline's website, click a few buttons, print your boarding pass and hopefully, remember to go to the airport the next day to catch the flight. I always assumed that the purpose of the check-in, was to report your readiness to travel by presenting yourself physically at the departure airport, so that the airline knows you exist and you are travelling. That no longer seems to be the case. The whole thing appears to me to be somewhat daft, as I don't see what it achieves, except perhaps prodding people into remembering that they have a flight the next day.

So I received the usual e-mail from United on Monday lunchtime letting me know that I could check-in for the flight to Cleveland on Tuesday. However, when I went to the website, it offered me a new option that I've not been offered before. The new option, which had been automatically ticked for me, was to enable automatic check-in for the rest of the flights on my itinerary the moment that check-in opens for a flight. i.e. I am not required to do anything at all in order to check-in for the flight.

So now, I don't even have to remember that I'm flying tomorrow, because the computer's already taken care of it.

Perhaps one day, the airlines will be able to operate without me ever having to go to the airport at all! That would certainly improve efficiency, although somebody already had this sort of idea.