[Update 9 Oct 2008: this mashup has been pulled off of mooshup.com.  See here for details.]

I wanted to go the head of the line on my recent Southwest Airlines flight.  Although Southwest doesn’t have assigned seats, those who check in first get to board first.  The last end up with yucky middle seats.  Especially useful in playing this system is the 24-hour advance checkin online.  If you can check in early, you get the lowest boarding number and your pick of the choicest seats.  But virtually everyone seems to know this now and there’s a bit of a grab for the best boarding numbers.  Wait two or three hours and half the passengers have checked in.

This time I successfully checked in online within 5 minutes of the opening of online checkin, even though I was actually in the air on another flight at the time!  My new and still under-development southwestAutoCheckin mashup worked brilliantly and gave me one of the lowest boarding numbers I’ve seen.  It works like this:

1. Use the try-it page to input information about your upcoming flight (confirmation number, passenger name, airport codes and so forth) into the mashup when you make your reservation.
2. The mashup will alert you that it is tracking your flight for automatic checkin.
3. 48 hours before the flight, the mashup will remind you it’s planning to check you in automatically.
4. 24 hours before the flight, the mashup will actually check you in, although it can’t print your boarding pass for you.
5. 3 hours before the flight, the mashup will alert you of the time of your flight.
6. Reprint your boarding pass at an airport kiosk.
7. After the scheduled flight time, the mashup will alert you that it has completed its work and is deleting the flight from its watch queue.

When I say “alert” I mean that the southwestAutoCheckin service uses the alertme service to distribute a notification to you.  You can register with the alertme service to send alerts through any set of email addresses, instant messenger accounts (MSN and Yahoo currently supported), or a Twitter feed.  Pretty cool, no?

Still lots to of improvements that can be made – more IM providers and even SMS for the alertme service, as well as a nice HTML interface; scraping the information out of a GMail message instead of having to input it manually, as well as automatically calculating the GMT time for the flight based on local time and the airport name.  But the basic mashup seems to have worked brilliantly in it’s first real world trial.

So yesterday when my flight started boarding, was I there proudly at the head of the line?  Ironically, no.  Boarding started early, and in the few moments while I was packing up my laptop and charger, all 18 other passengers had boarded.  Yes, despite having the best boarding pass obtained by my personal digital agent, I was the very last to board.  But I still had 119 empty seats to choose from ;-).

Upcoming flight on Southwest?  Let the southwestAutoCheckin mashup give you a helping hand!