Imagine being checked in automatically for your flight and reminded by phone alert when your gate is closing – this is what App In The Air can do for you.
With more than 2 million downloads so far, this personal flight assistant can give you all the flight information you need – boarding and landing times, delays and the estimated waiting time at check-in, passport control and security at your destination airport (17, 20 and 16 minutes for Dubai Terminal 3 according to the app).
There are also airport maps, Wi-Fi information and even bag tracking. The app works offline, so gate changes and flight status updates can be delivered by SMS without data roaming.
The app itself is free but an annual (Dh36.70) or monthly (Dh5.47) subscription is required for real-time flight status updates, automated check-in for up to two passengers (to sit together if possible) or to subscribe your family and friends to your flight details by SMS.
You can connect an Outlook, Windows Live or Google account to auto-import your travel itineraries or add flights manually by flight or route. You can also import from trip-planning tool TripIt, and even forward details to an App In The Air email address.
For the competitive and data-driven, the app has a leader board of all travellers in the system, awarding badges for red-eye flights, countries visited and milestone miles reached, as well as stats of the number of miles travelled and hours in the air. Plane spotters can also track the aircraft types they’ve flown on.
There are flyer tips on restaurants, where to charge your phone at the airport and how to get to the city centre, as well as weather and currency information.
Developers Aita say the app covers 93 per cent of all flight departures worldwide – 83 per cent in the Middle East. Charter flights have proved trickier to get details for, but the developer says it has plans to solve the problem.
The system is intuitive and easy to use, although none of my flights loaded automatically – but were added within a day when forwarded to the developers. A really useful app if you are, as are so many people in the UAE, a frequent flyer.
q&a take flight fully informed
Nikita Kosholkin, chief marketing officer of Aita and one of the three co-founders of App In The Air, tells Suzanne Locke more about the app:
Can the app really check you in for a flight?
Yes. Firstly, the user must enter all needed flight details in the app as well as their preference of where they want to sit. We pass this info to our partner Passnfly. It either successfully checks you in or tells you to check-in at the airport. For both cases we send you an email with the results.
Why did you create App in the Air?
We developed a geo-based chat called Squeek in 2011 to chat to people who were nearby, say at a university or cafe. We noticed many people were crossing in airports and started to think about what features we could give them additionally.
What was the inspiration for the name?
There is a film, Up in the Air, where the main character (played by George Clooney) is a frequent traveller and very comfortable with airports and all their procedures. With our app we wanted our users to feel like George Clooney's hero.
Any fun stories?
We provide flight status (delays, gate and terminal information and changes), not only by push notifications, but also via text message. Recently, a user wrote to us that he was in a business lounge talking to his friend when we notified him that boarding was closing in 15 minutes. He ran out of the lounge and got there minutes before the gate closed.
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