Airport amenity of the week: coat check

AmeliaEarhart-BuffaloCoat

Amelia Earhart’s buffalo coat – courtesy Buffalo Bill Center of the West.

When you’re flying off somewhere where you won’t need warm weather gear, wouldn’t it be great to be able to leave your heavy coat at the airport and pick it on the way home?

If you’re flying on JetBlue out of JFK’s T5 you now can.

CoatChex has set up a kiosk in the main marketplace area offering a ticketless coat checking service that costs $2 a day or $10 for a full week.

Instead of getting a paper claim ticket that could get lost on a trip, a traveler enters a phone number and their initials into a digital kiosk and then poses for a photo with their coat before handing it over for storage.

To get the coat back after their trip, the traveler keys in the last four of digits of their phone number at the claim desk to bring up the original photo and an ID number that tells the CoatChex staff where to find the coat.

Right now, the CoatChex kiosk at JetBlue’s T5 is in a temporary location, but plans are to have a larger, more centrally located kiosk that can accommodate more items.

JFK is not the first airport to have a coat check service. Frankfurt Airport is offering coat check service for less than a dollar a day through the end of April and for several winters Korean Air has been offering five complimentary days of coat storage to passengers flying out of Incheon International Airport in Seoul, South Korea.

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