Originally Posted by
hamburgler
believe it or not, IATA resolution 792 established a worldwide standard for 2D barcodes for boarding passes. I believe United's BPs are compliant with this, so other IATA carriers who comply should be able to just accept/scan the barcode. Of course, I doubt that US is there.
Partially correct.
Yes, there is a new IATA standard for 2D barcodes which provides a consistent format for the data to be contained in the barcode. However, UA nor US currently encode their barcode in this format. Because of this, for example, a BP issues by NH for a UA flight will not be processed by the reader.
However, a boarding pass issued by NH for an LH flight will be read by the LH reader as both LH and NH are using the new IATA standard.
I do not know exactly when, but there is a timeline in place for all airlines to convert to this standard for 2D barcodes. The magnetic stripe that was also mentioned in this thread is going away in the near future and all processing will be handled by barcodes rather than magnetics. This is the reason we are seeing "plain paper" boaring passes more and more instead of the more rigid cardboard type boarding cards.