iOS6 – Passbook support growing for Airline and Hotel industries

Apple announced its new iPhone and iOS6 on Wednesday, and news is slowly trickling down of which partners you’ll be able to use the Passbook application with:

• American Airlines
• United Airlines
• Delta Airlines
• Starwood Hotels Group

Passbook is a a virtual wallet application for passes, tickets, coupons and loyalty cards (in some ways replacing the apps that these organisations have – in other ways complimenting them in terms of Passbooks direct integration to the Lock Screen/Notifications Center.

Now whilst this is all well and good, this requires two things: A decent amount of power to last your entire journey and a reasonable internet connection. 

Power is one of those major annoyances when flying and you realise that your device is about to run out of power – this where installing USB Charging points on planes at seat makes a lot of sense (for any platform). Of course, you could always stick to PAPER boarding passes ;).

Now, I recently had to use OnAir to get some data whilst flying. Based on UK Roaming rates  7.16mb (that’s megabytes) costed a whacking total of £30 (US$45 or so) with Vodafone UK – and that’s a fair wodge of cash no matter how you cut it. Yes, you can negate to a point with WiFi connectivity, but there will always come a point where you will be in only a mobile phone mast range and all the wifi hotspots are password around you…

Passbook – part of iOS6 will be available for download from 19th September sometime.