American Has Started Redacting Frequent Flyer Numbers On Boarding Passes

by Gary Leff

This past Wednesday, boarding passes printed by American Airlines agents no longer show a customer’s full frequent flyer number on them. The last four characters are redacted on all boarding passes printed using American’s QIKCHK system.

As the airline tells their employees in a recent memo reviewed by View From The Wing, “this will ensure that personal customer data is protected in case the boarding pass is misplaced or not properly discarded.”

  • The full number still appears on an agent’s screen.

  • This is still just for agent-printed boarding passes. Kiosks, mobile app, and American Airlines website boarding passes still show full frequent flyer numbers, although the plan is that these “will also eventually conceal the frequent flyer number by end of 2023.”

To be sure, your boarding pass still has a bar code. Someone with a bar code scanner or app could read it. But that’s not the person most likely to pick up your boarding pass. It actually seems more likely that someone would pick up your boarding pass and add your reservation to their Business ExtrAA account for small business program credit (in addition to you receiving your miles).

In addition, someone with your name and travel information off of a boarding pass could social engineer information about you, your trip, and your account by speaking to an agent. This isn’t the end all for security.

But there’s not really any reason that the frequent flyer number itself needs to be printed on the boarding pass, so redacting it partially does seem to make sense. Just as with rolling out (annoying) multifactor authentication for logging into accounts, they want to reduce the likelihood that someone steals your miles – since they’re on the hook to make good and loyalty program fraud is a huge expense.

About Gary Leff

Gary Leff is one of the foremost experts in the field of miles, points, and frequent business travel - a topic he has covered since 2002. Co-founder of frequent flyer community InsideFlyer.com, emcee of the Freddie Awards, and named one of the "World's Top Travel Experts" by Conde' Nast Traveler (2010-Present) Gary has been a guest on most major news media, profiled in several top print publications, and published broadly on the topic of consumer loyalty. More About Gary »

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Comments

  1. A reasonable reason to leave a partial number on there is to give the passenger confidence that their correct number is in the booking and they will be credited accordingly.

  2. American got the most complicated boarding passes. Why so much stuff on there

  3. Especially when the frequent flyer “NUMBER” on a partner airline for credit.
    And when the flight does not credit and the partner frequent flyer program wants a boarding pass with their number on it…….
    There are a number of blogs threads about consistencies found in the computer systems of all airlines.

  6. Wow, I haven’t seen that messy of a style of a boarding pass in maybe ten years. I pulled out my Korean Air boarding pass from two month ago and checked. The Korean Air boarding pass is of a much cleaner design without printing with lines through it and printing spilling out of colored areas (the KA pass is all white with black printing except for the KA logo). It also doesn’t have all of the dots and security paper design.

  8. If you book with United and the flight is operated by ANA (NH), the whole frequent flyer number will show. With e-ticket and technology, not sure why carriers must show everything.

  9. Anyone motivated enough to misuse a boarding pass is motivated enough to download a barcode scanning app to misuse a boarding pass. Leaving the full number in the barcode makes this change entirely cosmetic. The frequent flyer account number shouldn’t be in the barcode at all.

  10. Ed and Chris are misinformed alarmists.

    The ability to scan a barcode is useless without access to the related database. Scanner apps access the integrated retail databases, but not proprietary ones, like airlines.

  11. Sorry, there is no way to go in and manually add frequent flyer numbers in BE. The only way to add a number is for that person to enter the BE number to their profile. And unless they complete a trip that includes the BE number there will be no credit to the account.

  12. Why do we even have these anymore? Most things are digitized. But any cell phone can read a barcode so not sure how that helps?

  16. 13334932 is not the frequent flier account number. It is the number embedded in the barcode which *would* point to the AA account *IF* the device reading it had access to the correct database.

  18. Unbelievable, everyone has to copy everyone, no one can be a stand out from one another

Comments are closed.