China Eastern airlines has launched a new application which allows passengers to book tickets from their mobile phones, reported the Shanghai Daily this past week.
This move makes China Eastern Airlines the first Chinese carrier to offer this service. The Shanghai-based airline currently serves 197 destinations around the world.
The app will also allow passengers to use their mobile phones as a boarding pass. The application, which is available in English and Chinese, will allow passengers to receive a bar code on their mobile phones following their ticket purchase, which can then be used for boarding.
In a bid to improve service quality, the airline has also created a separate new app for its flight crew to check on certain passenger information such as food preferences.
Another Chinese carrier, Air China, recently announced that it would soon launch a similar mobile phone app for ticketing without specifying dates.
This move to adopt a virtual boarding pass comes in the wake of other airlines allowing passengers to travel with mobile boarding passes including AirAsia, Cathay Pacific and Japan Airlines.
Findings released this week from the 2012 "Air Transport World Passenger Self-service Survey" by airline technology company SITA showed that airline passengers want more self-service and mobile-based offerings to reduce the stress of traveling. The study also revealed as many as 21 percent of the 2,526 respondents surveyed have used a mobile boarding pass.