The highlight on the summer travel schedule for many this year will no doubt be the chance to skip check-in at the airport altogether and go straight to the departures area, with nothing more than ID and an electronic boarding pass.
Such is the lead announcement from Nanjing Lukou International Airport, as regards its summer travel plan for 2018. In what amounts to a long in the making, coming of age for the airline industry in Nanjing, from 1st July, passengers with only cabin baggage are able to bypass check-in altogether and go straight to immigration or the security check with their passport or ID card, together with an electronic boarding pass. The latter can be issued by not only the website of the airline with which the passenger is flying, but also the airport’s official WeChat account (“Nanjing Lukou International Airport”) or an APP, such as Umetrip.
The bad news, of course, is that passengers with hold baggage will still be required to go to the check-in counters, just as back at the dawn of the aviation industry.
The summer bonanza announcement also includes the revealing of new destinations and an increased frequency for some popular summertime routes. Among them, Shanghai-based Juneyao Airlines plans to increase its frequency of flights from Nanjing to Osaka to 12 flights a week, and Russian charter airline iFly that now flies direct to and from Nanjing/ Moscow. It is the latter’s second flight direct to Russia from China’s southern capital, following the debut of a Nanjing to St. Petersburg flight in January, according to Our Jiangsu.
iFly is a Russian charter airline, specialising in flights to tourist destinations popular among citizens of the Russian Federation, former CIS countries, Eastern European countries and China. Founded in 2009 and operating mainly out of Moscow’s Vnukovo International Airport, all services are flown on behalf of Russian tour operator TEZ Tour.
