That’s right, you read it correctly – one boarding pass with two flights on it. In all the years I have been flying, I have never seen anything like it.
Usually when travelling on a multi-sector itinerary, you’re given a single boarding pass for each flight. That seems to be a thing of the past as you will see below.
A Boarding Pass With Two Flights
Recently I was flying KLM on a trip from Dublin to Amsterdam in economy and then from Amsterdam to Toulouse in business. Everyone had to go to the desk to get their boarding passes, even if you checked in via the app. Imagine my surprise when I was handed this bad boy!
Confusion?
The only confusion I experienced was in Dublin. Check-in was separated into two lines, one for group one and two and another for the rest. My boarding pass clearly said Sky Priority on it due to my connection being in business class. However, since I was in economy, I was in Group 4.
Overall Thoughts
The boarding pass with two flights is pretty cool. Clearly I think that as I’ve just written a whole article about it and my experiences with it, which I am sure has changed your life 🙂
Have you ever come across more than one flight on a boarding pass before? Which airline was that? Thank you for reading and if you have any comments or questions, please leave them below.
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Featured image by Jonathan Palombo via Wikimedia Commons.
Here an example with three flights on one single paper: https://farm1.staticflickr.com/717/21042844354_09539a20d2_c.jpg
Very efficient use of the paper there! Nicely done 🙂 Thanks for that!
The ones I know of are SAS (Scandinavian Airways), TAP (TAP Air Portugal), and KLM (Royal Dutch Airlines).
Since you’re interested, here’s a fun fact: If you scan the barcode of your boarding pass, you’ll notice the first letter is an M, followed by the number 2. The M stands for “multi-leg” and the number is how many legs are encoded.
A boarding pass with current barcode standards can encode up to four flights on a single boarding pass. Thus far I haven’t seen one using 4 to my recollection. KLM seems to use up to 2 (their aesthetic design prevents them from having more due to available space for the human readable part) and I think I might’ve seen a TAP one with three but I’m not sure. Three-leg boarding passes seem to be as rare compared to two-leg ones, as two-leg ones are compared to single leg ones.
Another interesting fact is that, even though the M stands for multi-leg, the single leg barcode no longer uses the “S” identifier, but instead is simply “M1”.
There’s an interesting blog post that contains some other things about the barcode if you’re interested – https://javadude.wordpress.com/2017/10/07/whats-in-my-boarding-pass-barcode/ (Not written by me, nor affiliated.)
Thanks for the heads up on that post, that was really interesting to read. I didn’t know that before, so it was nice to add to my knowledge. Not to mention other airlines that have more than one sector to a boarding pass! Really appreciate that, so thanks again.
How would this work if you have a long layover and plan to leave the airport? I have a 23 hour layover and was planning to leave the airport and stay in a hotel for the night. Anyone have any experience with this? Thank you!
I imagine this would be fine. At worst, they’ll issue new boarding passes when you come back. I daresay there won’t be an issue here. Have fun!
WAY back in the day when my Mom worked for Ozark and we non-revved everywhere, we did get a boarding pass once for two flights but separately on the same piece of paper. They were not shown as pictured but it was told to us to keep both but to tear them in two as the gate agent would take the first one. It was a trial thing which apparently didn’t last long, it was a non-rev thing that never happened again. Weird. Funny thing is I don’t remember the itinerary and I usually have good recall about things like that.
Now that’s interesting! Sounds like some kind of manual voucher system or something. Curious! Perhaps it’ll come back to you at some point… haha – but I guess we can’t remember everything. I know I certainly don’t!!
I believe Northwest was the first airline to do this. They had this in place for connecting flights on 1 BP before they merged with Delta over a decade ago.
AF/KL does it now
Very good info there, thanks for that!
Alaska Airlines does this. When you’re holding onto boarding passes for the whole family, one per person is really nice. It does make you wonder why it isn’t an industry standard.
Good to know – and I agree, you’d think it would be common everywhere. Maybe it’s limited to airlines using a certain software package? Who can say. Perhaps we will see more of this in future.
I also have seen boarding passe with multiple flights on them several times during the last few years when I started the trip with KLM. It might get confusing with one’s connecting flight (the second one on the boarding pass) indeed. Not for the passenger but maybe for a flight attendant during boarding a widebody aircraft. A quick glance at the boarding pass might fixate on the wrong fligtht (the first one). That happened to me once and I was forced to walk down the wrong aisle and to take someone else’s seat. Luckily, that other person was flying with me (we were a group of 4 sitting in the middle section of an A330).
I guess people would have to pay close attention to what was written on them, when there is more than one flight. Nice to hear your experience there, thanks for sharing that!
I just flew KLM to AMS from JFK then AMS to DUS. They gave me two boarding passes. Damn!
Aww, that’s just rude of them 🙂
It is quite common in Europe .. Also possible to do with different airlines if on the same PNR ..
I’ve never seen it before myself – the oneworld airlines I fly tend to always print one per flight. Thanks for the comment!
SAS did it as well on my LAX-CPH-BER flight.
Thanks for that, cool to know that SAS also do this kind of thing. Appreciate that!
A few years ago I had one with three flights on it. It was in Europe but I can’t remember the airline.
Would be interesting to see that boarding pass and how they fit all the information on there!