TL;DR: It started off bad due to poor software and ended up bad for unknown reasons.
I went to Las Vegas as a birthday gift for myself, and (so far) all I got was resentments.
Once I got there, my mood turned sour when I tried to use my mobile ticket on the Las Vegas Monorail. I paid $24 for two days of rail pass, but the gate denied me my first day. The software scanned the barcode I was showing on my phone, it claimed the ticket (and the money) and then … did NOT open the gate. So I tried the ticket again, and it barked at me that I was trying to use the ticket “too soon” although clearly nothing checks that the gate had been opened or not.
I went back to my room and checked their website from the laptop I brought. Now I got conflicting information: apparently, just scanning a barcode on a cell phone is NOT supposed to work – but from a mobile wallet it will. Their web page said something about combating fraud due to images shared by people. Oof. I had not printed the piece of paper, and now it was too late in the evening to find an open print place.
I’d never opened the email from the Las Vegas Monorail on my cell phone, because I don’t do email on my cell phone. Likewise, I also had trouble finding the email from six months ago, but eventually I found it. Back to my cell phone, I use webmail and open the email and then the mobile ticket the email linked to. It has a link I’d never seen before: Add to Apple Wallet.
I’d never seen that link before, because I don’t do email on my iPhone. Whenever I’d opened the email on the desktop, it would say Add to Google Wallet (which irritated me). Their website also touts Google as their partner with Google Pay (more irritation).
Okay, the email on iPhone might work: I click the Add to Apple Wallet button, and it takes me to the page, and … it barks at me that this ticket has ALREADY been claimed as a paper ticket. Damn it!
The next morning, I try the monorail again, and this time the barcode does work.
Okay, so it was all just a big glitch from when they claimed the ticket and fouled up linking that to an “open the gate now” action. And the warnings about not allowing cell phone images instead of paper were wrong.
I try the monorail to get to the show I’m going to see, but of course, casinos are going to route people to where the gambling is – but I need to find Las Vegas Boulevard. I get lost, wander around outside, then inside, then outside again. I’m too hot and eventually call for a Lyft.
One last problem: the iPhone was infuriating by blocking the QR code display every time.
Every time I tried to show the QR code to the turnstile, Apple Wallet took over and preempted it with the NFC “Double-Click the side button to pay”. There are two problems here: 1) To show the QR code, the iPhone screen is facing away from me, so I don’t know that the image of the QR code has been replaced by the image of my credit card with the button prompt madly blinking at me. 2) All weekend, I tried every setting in Apple Wallet that I could think of to turn it off and stop fucking up the boarding pass. NOTHING worked. Finally, on the last monorail trip, I got the inspiration to put the phone into Airplane Mode. That was the ONLY thing that worked to stop Apple Wallet from fucking up the boarding pass QR code.
And OBTW, the monorail broke on that last trip, and what should have taken fifteen minutes took an hour and a half in a jam-packed car. They even sent us north on the southbound car for some reason. With some hindsight, it was comical, but during it, it was quite annoying.
Days later, I’m wondering if the Apple Wallet NFC preemption is what broke the first interaction when the turnstile registered the ticket (claiming it) but failed to open the gate. I’ll never know. But I do know I felt defeated that I’d paid for a two-day ticket and was denied late in the evening that first day.