Modern smartphones have made paper versions of tickets redundant, but not everyone thinks so. The tourist and travel expert gave Insider reasons why she always prints out her boarding pass and advises everyone to do the same.
Travel expert Sophie-Claire Hoeller prefers a hard paper copy of her ticket and boarding pass to the digital version. She finds printed papers to be more reliable and prevent a lot of smartphone-related hassles.
“My phone has been switched off at the airport several times already. The application may crash. The battery sits down. Wi-Fi may fail. The page will close. I might run out of traffic. The phone will be blocked at the most inopportune moment. And a paper ticket is simple, secure and convenient, with all your travel details in one place, easy to find,” Sophie-Claire assures.
The tourist doesn't want to be the person holding everyone else up and rummaging through her smartphone looking for the right file or page. Also, the paper boarding and personal approach opens up new possibilities. “Conversing with a live person when receiving a printed ticket helped me avoid seat selection fees when my husband and I wanted to sit together, take another flight if necessary, and even get an upgrade sometimes,” the expert lists.
Dead phones can cause a lot of trouble at airports, even if they have free charging points. Affordable USB charging ports seem like the perfect answer to the death of the device, but government agencies are warning travelers against using them.
In a social media post, a Denver FBI spokesperson wrote: “Avoid using free chargers at airports, hotels or malls. Criminals have found ways to use public USB ports to inject malware and monitoring software onto devices. Take your charger and USB cable and use an electrical contact instead of a port.”
The FBI describes a scam called “juice jacking” in which hackers siphon information off a phone while a person uses a public USB charger. The Los Angeles County Attorney General's Office added to the report: “Criminals download malware onto chargers or cables that are left connected to devices. In this way, they can infect phones and other electronic devices of unsuspecting users. Malicious software can lock the device or transfer data and passwords directly to the attacker's computer.
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