End of an era at Southwest
Airline ticket jackets are no more. Travel,
Flying Southwest this summer and like to stash your boarding pass in those colorful paper holders they hand out at the airport?
You’re out of luck.
Ticket jackets, as the document holders are called, have gone the way of peanuts on Southwest. The airline stopped giving out the holders on Saturday.
The airline, which doles out about 22 million ticket jackets a year, eliminated them to “reduce waste, protect our environment, use less paper and ultimately become a greener company,” spokesman Dan Landson said in a statement.
Southwest is the last major airline to ditch the ticket jackets, a relic from an era when airlines issued paper tickets.
Most tickets are now electronic, and boarding passes have moved that way, too. Travelers who don’t fly Southwest, the nation’s largest domestic carrier, may not even know they still exist.
United Airlines said it eliminated ticket jackets in the early 2000s. Delta Air Lines did away with them in 2008. Alaska says it did away with them more than a decade ago. The last time American used them was in 2014. Spirit Airlines eliminated them in late 2016 as mobile boarding passes and self-service check-in kiosks grew in popularity.
Landson said Southwest has seen an increase in the number of travelers using mobile boarding passes and decided now was the time to eliminate the paper holders.
“Through this change in behavior, we feel like we’ve reached a good point to transition away from paper ticket jackets,” he said.
The look of Southwest’s ticket jackets, like other airlines’, evolved with the airline’s style and slogans over the years. The ticket jackets included gate information, Southwest reservations information and ads for Southwest products including gift cards. In the past, baggage claim checks were stapled to them.
A decade ago, one Southwest frequent flier got his close-up on Southwest’s ticket jackets.
Terry Buchen, president of Golf Agronomy International, said he was selected to be on the ticket jacket after he gushed nonstop about Southwest at a party the airline hosted for frequent fliers in Baltimore.
Southwest flew Buchen and his wife to Austin, Texas, for a photo shoot and treated them to a luxury hotel, meals and a new outfit from Nordstrom for the ad. (Yes, he got to keep it.)
Buchen was on the ticket jacket from 2007 to 2009.
He was often recognized at the airport by fellow travelers and Southwest employees, earning the nickname “the ticket jacket guy,” he told the New York Times in 2008.
“People used to ask me for autographs,” Buchen said in a phone interview with USA TODAY. “It was a lot of fun. I really had fun.”
Buchen, 72, has a framed copy of the ticket jacket at his home outside Boise, Idaho, and saved about 100 of the ticket jackets with his picture on them.