Take me out to the ball game, take me out with the crowd. Buy me an eticket for my iPhone 4S. Passbook support is simply the best. And we'll root, root, root for the Giants, if your team doesn't have Passbook that's a shame. For it's scan! Beep! Please come right in at a Giants gaaaaame!
Until yesterday's release of iOS 6, the biggest mystery in the OS was Passbook, since it didn't work in the developer betas. While Passbook appears like a regular app, conveniently shoehorned onto the home screen of every iOS 6-running iPhone and iPod touch (no Passbook on iPads), it's more of a storage location for passes. Until you get a pass from somewhere else, in other words, the app doesn't do anything on its own.
My first pass arrived last night, from MLB Advanced Media and Tickets.com -- a ticket to last night's thorough trouncing of the Colorado Rockies by my beloved San Francisco Giants, at beautiful AT&T Park. Besides the mighty Giants, Passbook tickets are also offered by three other MLB teams served by Tickets.com: the Boston Red Sox, Kansas City Royals, and New York Mets. More should be coming along next season, as stadiums upgrade their scanner technology.
Passes can be loaded from mobile apps (like Walgreens or Target), or from, say, a purchase confirmation screen or email. First, I got a confirmation email for my Tickets.com purchase:
Clicking the Add to Passbook link launched this secure order details page in Mobile Safari (I didn't have to log in or anything):
And clicking the Add to Passbook link there launched the Passbook app, where this pretty little thing was waiting for me:
(Normally, sharing screenshots of your passes is a BIG no-no, since someone else could save the screenshot, display it on their own device's screen, and snake your pass right out from under you. But since this ticket has been used and the event is in the past...go nuts.)
Armed with this, I made my way to the stadium, where sure enough, I got a pop-up telling me I was close. Passes are time- and location-sensitive, so you'll get reminders when you're close to your desination or an event is about to start.
Once I arrived, the friendly ticket takers scanned my pass at the gate. Beep! I was in.
I also got a paper receipt, but this isn't a universal thing. AT&T Park allows ticket buyers to purchase additional credit to be used inside the stadium, for food or souvenirs: $10 gets you $12 in credit, and you just present your ticket at a concession stand, where the barcode is scanned again. But those concession stands only have 1D scanners, and Passbook passes require 2D scanners, so my paper receipt has a "regular" barcode in case I need to use it to buy an oat soda. Anyway, so I also got this receipt, which was instantly printed right at the gate when my pass was scanned.
The whole process was pretty seamless, I must say. Chad Evans, senior vice president of mobile product development for MLB Advanced Media (the company behind the brilliant MLB.com At Bat and MLB At the Ballpark apps, among others), told me that Apple's been a great partner. MLB AM was invited to build a prototype pass just two days before the unveiling of Passbook at June's WWDC keynote, where a Giants ticket was shown in the demo. In the three months since then, he says, Tickets.com did a lot of the work, testing the links added to confirmation emails, training staff at the stadiums, making sure the scanners would work, and so on.
Multiple tickets per order? Those are all loaded at once, and you can swipe horizontally between them, so the gate agent can scan one pass for each member of your party. Need to transfer a ticket to someone else? Forward the email with the Add to Passbook link and your friend can add it to their own phone, although each pass can only be scanned once, of course. (Race you to the gate!)
The back of the pass has some extra info too, like an address that launches Maps when clicked, an option to display the pass on my lock screen, and the little trash can icon, which "shreds" the pass when I'm done with it. (Unless you want to keep it, which I totally do.)
They even thought of "crazy edge cases" like your phone dying or getting lost en route to the game -- stadium customer service agents can look you up by email address and confirm that you did have tickets, then just print you new paper ones. "We want to make sure nobody has a bad experience," Evans said.
No complaints here -- my experience was great. And the Giants won 7-1 behind ace pitcher Matt Cain on a crisp September evening. What could be better?
