How to Add Any Boarding Pass to Google Wallet

You check in the night before on your laptop. The airline gives you a PDF and no “Add to Google Wallet” button anywhere. So at the airport you are the person scrolling through email attachments in the security line. Upload that PDF here instead and get a real wallet pass back — with the boarding zone, gate, seat and boarding time on it. 150 sats per pass, no account, no card, no signup.

Why the manual trick loses your boarding zone

Plenty of airlines never offer a wallet button on web check-in. Air Canada is the one we hit first: check in on a laptop and all you get is a PDF. The workaround everyone knows is to open the pass on your laptop, display the barcode big on screen, then scan it with your phone camera so Google offers to save it. Several steps across two screens, at the exact moment you least want them.

And after all that, the pass you end up with is incomplete. Here is the reason, and it is worth knowing. The barcode on a boarding pass follows the IATA BCBP standard, Resolution 792. That standard defines exactly what the barcode carries: passenger name, booking reference, flight number, date, seat and cabin. It does not carry the boarding zone, the gate, or the boarding time.

Those three fields live only as printed text on the face of the pass. So when you scan the barcode and nothing else, they are simply not there to be read. That is not a bug in Google Wallet. It is what the barcode contains.

What this service does instead

It reads both halves of your boarding pass. The barcode, for the flight data and the signature. And the printed text, for the zone, gate, terminal and boarding time that the barcode never held. Then it builds one wallet pass out of the two, so what lands on your phone is the whole pass, not a partial one.

• The barcode is copied byte for byte. Nothing is regenerated. Many carriers digitally sign the barcode and the TSA verifies that signature on US routes, so a re-encoded barcode would be a real problem. This one is the airline’s original bytes, signature intact.
• Verified at real gates. We tested it on actual Air Canada flights in both directions. Priority security and lounge access worked too, because the business-class cabin code rides along inside the untouched barcode.
• The whole family in one upload. Drop in several files, or one file with several passengers on it. You get one save link per passenger, plus a single link that adds everybody at once.
• PDF or a photo. The airline’s PDF works best, but a clear screenshot or a photo of a printed pass works too.

Four steps, about a minute

Booking bots, itinerary assistants, corporate travel pipelines

# Step 1: Send the boarding pass (returns 402 + invoice)
curl -X POST https://sats4ai.com/api/l402/boardingpass-wallet \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"documents":["data:application/pdf;base64,<...>"]}'

# Step 2: Pay the Lightning invoice (150 sats per pass)

# Step 3: Resend with payment proof
curl -X POST https://sats4ai.com/api/l402/boardingpass-wallet \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -H "Authorization: L402 <token>:<preimage>" \
  -d '{"documents":["data:application/pdf;base64,<...>"]}'

# Response: one save_url per passenger, plus save_all_url