Google Wallet’s new feature wants to ease your travel woes

This year’s multi-day Google I/O event featured a series of announcements from Google, focusing largely on its AI products. At the same time, the company also revealed Nearby Passes notifications for Wallet, designed to deliver timely, location-based notifications using data from saved passes. Google Wallet is now rolling out this handy feature, along with check-in alerts for your upcoming flights.

When available, users will find a prompt to “Set up nearby notifications” when opening an existing pass. In a related but separate development, Wallet is also rolling out a “Check in to your flight” notification over the past few weeks that potentially pulls flight confirmation details from Gmail, according to 9to5Google. This notification lists the flight’s destination and the airline you’re flying with.

Google stated in May that nearby passes notifications will work with boarding passes, event tickets, loyalty cards, and offers. The idea is to automatically pull up the loyalty card, boarding pass, event ticket, etc, based on your proximity to the venue, so users don’t need to open the Wallet app and find the pass manually.

The pass will appear at the right place and the right time

First-time users will receive a prompt to set up nearby notifications, as shown above. When set up, a notification will appear on your screen, and a single tap will open the corresponding pass. Understandably, this feature will only work when you’ve given the Wallet app access to your location, with the setup page specifying that permissions should be set to “Allow all the time.”

Wallet also lets you enable or disable nearby notifications for each pass from the pass details page, giving you full control over which passes appear in your notifications. This feature should be rolling out widely at the moment, though we recommend updating Google Wallet or force-closing and reopening the app if you’re not seeing it yet.

Apart from these handy location-based pass notifications, Google Wallet is also working on an Express Transit Card feature to let users designate a specific credit/debit card for transit payments. This would be separate from the card set up for tap-to-pay transactions.

This would be a massive upgrade from the current system of unlocking the device, opening Google Wallet, and changing the payment method each time for a transit payment. Unsurprisingly, Google Wallet is late to the party here as both Apple and Samsung already offer a version of this feature on their respective devices.

Unlike the nearby notifications feature for passes, we don’t know when this updated transit payment system will be available in Google Wallet.