The Fandango iPhone app (free) has been updated for iOS 6 and the iPhone 5 to support the new Passbook feature. Passbook will allow movie theaters to scan a barcode displayed on your iPhone’s screen to confirm your ticket purchase.
It sounds useful in theory, but unfortunately, the Passbook implementation in the Fandango app is currently hard to find and without much instruction.
Few theaters support Passbook, and it’s a lot of work to find the theaters in the Fandango app that do. In the app’s description, Fandango says to “look for the ‘Mobile Ticket’ icon on the theater page.” Well, I had to tap through 20 theaters in Chicago one by one until I found the mobile ticket icon (which really means Passbook support. Why don’t they just say “Passbook tickets”? Presumably because they want these mobile tickets to be used on other phones as well). The “mobile ticket icon” looks like this:
There is no way to list just the theaters that support Passbook. You have to tap in and out of each theater to find one that does. Most users will likely think, as I did, that Passbook “just works,” meaning if you buy a movie ticket via Fandango, you can use it in Passbook. Not so.
I hope Passbook support will grow quickly, but at least for Fandango, it’s not very widespread so far, and it’s not very intuitive to use.
Fandango’s app has supported “Mobile Tickets” for some time now. I recall using it for a couple of early summer movies, but I’m not certain exactly when it showed up.
Mobile Tickets were simply QR codes that were emailed to you. You could also pull up the code within the all itself. Fandango simply extended the feature by adding the Passbook hooks. As the feature predates Passbook I wouldn’t expect them to add a filter for Passbook-only theaters… but its a nice idea.
Obviously, a barcode-based mobile ticket is going to require a scanner on the receiving end.
Thank you SO much for posting this. I thought I was going crazy trying to get Fandango to work with Passbook, reinstalling, combing through Fandango’s site and finding NO mention of Passbook outside of a press release. It would have been nice if Apple and Fandango had made it more clear that this was a project that was still ramping up to theaters. Apple makes it sound like once a seller’s app is compatible with Passbook, that’s all there is to it…
Fandango has a list of mobile ticketing theaters sorted by state, which makes it easier to find one nearby! Here’s the link: http://www.fandango.com/mobiletickets