I'm saddened to report that Southwest Airlines has effectively shut down Pass-a-matic, the service that would act as your proxy to retrieve the coveted A-1 boarding pass. The service, which I raved about two months ago, would take your reservation number and use it to jump on the Southwest Web site precisely 24 hours before your flight's departure time to grab the good seats.
Southwest, clearly, was not amused, and recently amended the terms of service for its Web site with this proviso: "You may not use Southwest's web sites for or in connection with offering any third party product or service not authorized or approved by Southwest. For example, online check-in service providers may not use the Southwest web sites to check-in Customers online or attempt to obtain for them a boarding pass in any certain boarding group."
An email from Pass-a-matic notified users of the shutdown: "Southwest Airlines has asked us to stop the operations of our boarding pass retrieval service for their airline...We are complying with their request immediately."
I mourn the passing of Pass-a-matic. It was a civilized solution to a barbarous process.
Just in case I wasn't crystal clear in my earlier post about Southwest Airlines' new online boarding pass lottery, I despise the carrier's "cattle car" seat assignment scheme. There's at least one clever entrepreneur (and future Webware T-Shirt wearer) out there who feels the same way I do and is building Pass-a-matic. This service, still in closed beta, should do exactly what I want. First, it will act as my agent on Southwest's online check-in service, logging in at the precisely right time to "snipe" the coveted low-numbered "A" boarding passes. Second, in doing so, it undermines the whole time-based, twitchy process Southwest employs to assign boarding priority, and could eventually force Southwest to abandon the process and just allow online seat selection like a civilized carrier.
I think I can handle this UI.
The site looks very easy to use. Just enter in your Southwest confirmation number and it handles the rest.
Southwest could try to kill Pass-a-matic by requiring captchas or some other test to assure that its check-in site only interacts with real people and not bots. But since Pass-a-matic will eventually be a paid service, the company can afford to fight back by farming out captcha solving to a service bureau or to a distributed captcha technology like ReCaptcha (review).
In the future, this technology will be be applied to other services that have a similar rush-the-gate process: buying tickets to concerts, getting good seats on airlines where you're not a premier member, and so on.
See also: PlaneFast.
It's because of things like this that I love the Web.
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