Delta has stopped printing two bar codes on boarding passes. They now print a single 2-D boarding pass barcode on paper printouts, and they’ve removed the vertical 1-D code that used to live on the right edge. Delta agents agents say the reason is to save ink when printing boarding passes. Yet according to a Delta Air Lines spokesperson,
Delta began making this minor change to our printed boarding passes this summer to increase compatibility with more airport barcode scanners around the world.
VAL KILMER'S BOARDING PASS??? (2009) pic.twitter.com/liqpHVbqNS
— Howl Kilmer (@HowlKilmer) November 18, 2025
Both explanations are true.
The airline industry has been migrating to IATA’s Bar-Coded Boarding Pass (BCBP) standard, which uses a 2-D symbology (PDF417 for printed passes and Aztec/QR/DataMatrix for mobile) so a single barcode carries everything the airline and airport systems need.
That vertical barcode was a legacy, 1-D (linear) code. It can be vendor-specific and different for each airline. It’s been kept around for backward compatibility with older scanners and legacy processes.
You would think having the extra barcode would be innocuous. However barcode imagers will scan whatever readable symbology they find first, and a stray 1-D code near the main code can:
- be read instead of the more desired code, handing back useless data to the 2-D system, or
- Infringe the required “quiet zone” around the 2-D symbol and reduce scan reliability.
Both cause intermittent failures at check-in, security, or the gate. A scanner that decodes a linear code when the system expects a BCBP string will look broken even though the boarding pass itself is fine.
Delta doesn’t think they need the older code for compatibility anymore, to deal with legacy systems. That’s great. IATA also explicitly sells the 2-D encoding as a cost-savings on printers, mag stripe hardware, etc.
The incremental cost of one extra 1D barcode on thermal stock is tiny per pass, but across tens of millions of boarding passes a year, it’s not literally zero: more printed area, more wear on print heads, slightly longer print time. At scale that’s real money. Remember American Airlines saved $40,000 cutting a single olive from first class salads (that’s over $100,000 in today’s dollars).
Front line agents may hear both compatibility and saving supplies, which means greener and less waste (always and everywhere and especially at Delta code for cost cutting) and repeat the cost-cutting piece to customer. But both elements are true parts of the story here.
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