Very interesting reading through all of the comments and scenarios on this thread, going back through the years!

I wonder if anyone has any experience of the following. A lady I work with told me she always has issues with BA at LHR when returning to JFK from LHR. She’s a frequent flyer and has AAdvatage membership linked when she travels in CW. Bookings are never changed and she travels as issued, BA ticket, BA metal.

She is checked in online for her flight home, and successfully receives a passbook boarding pass and always brings a PDF printout - these are the ones that say “your passport needs to be checked at the airport”. When she gets to T5 and tries to use said boarding passes to proceed through security, they never work and she has to go to a desk or a kiosk to get a BP from BA, where I presume BA actually do the pp verification.

I guess the question is, if the passport needs to be checked before you go through security, why do they give her any boarding pass at all online and and not just give the holding “you are checked in but you must collect your boarding pass at the airport” message?

On AA, when you OLCI you upload the photo page/barcode and guess that that is used to “verify” the passport but I don’t think you can do so on the BA app and certainly not if you are not logged in with a BAEC account.

My secondary thought is, if the above is just “the way it is with BA”, unless I’m mistaken, it’s 100% just impossible to check in online and head through security without visiting some kind of counter for all nationalities when traveling to the US.!

sorry for the long rambling post and please forgive any typos!