Air Canada wouldn't put my boarding pass in Google Wallet unless I installed their app.
Checking in on a laptop just gets you a PDF. So I'd scan the barcode into Wallet by hand and end up with a pass missing my boarding zone — which is the one thing you actually need while standing in the queue.
So I built the thing I wanted: upload the airline's PDF (or a screenshot), pay 100 sats, get a real Google Wallet pass back.
- ~$0.06 per pass. Lightning. No account, no card, no email, no app to install.
- Keeps the fields a barcode scan drops — boarding zone, gate, boarding time, terminal. They're not in the barcode; the IATA standard never carried them. They only exist as printed text, so we read the text too.
- Whole family in one upload — one save link per passenger plus an add-all link.
- Nothing stored. Processed in memory, save link expires in 30 minutes.
- If we can't add anything beyond the barcode, you're refunded —
Also has an L402 endpoint, so an agent can pay and use it without a human.
Bonus finding from building it: I tested whether Google fills the gate in by itself, since it runs Google Flights. It doesn't. It adds a flight-status line underneath but never writes into the pass — so if nobody extracts your zone and gate, they're just gone.
I mean, you can also just screenshot the pdf/boarding pass and Google Wallet reads it.
What a waste of generation space
If you have tried that, you know:
a) It doesnt give you your boarding zone, and sometimes gate /time
b) at least for me, the scanning is ridiculously long and fails 50% of the time
And the beauty is, if you dont like it, you dont have to use it!
interesting... I'll try it out on my next trip 🤔