Want a Printed Airline Boarding Pass? Be Ready to Shell Out $25

Like some airline passengers, Laurie Ulster has anxiety about flying.

Hers has nothing to do with engine trouble or turbulence. Ulster frets about relying on her phone to display her mobile boarding pass at the boarding gate. For every flight, she prints it out at home or at the airport.

“I want to have that piece of paper,” said Ulster, a 57-year-old writer and copy editor in Pelham, N.Y. “I just tuck it into my passport. There’s no worries about preserving the battery on my phone.”

The fear of fumbling around with a phone at the gate while impatient travelers harrumph behind you—or, worse, getting hobbled by a dying battery or dodgy Wi-Fi—gets some passengers more anxious about boarding the plane than flying at 35,000 feet.

Airlines looking to save time and money—and add a new fee or two—are putting pressure on passengers to go digital. Alaska Airlines, for one, is overhauling its check-in lobbies at 115 airports and removing self-service kiosks where customers could print out boarding passes. The company is installing iPad-based stations that print only luggage tags.

Alaska Airlines passengers can print boarding passes at home, if they have a printer. If they forget, they can wait for a customer-service agent to print one, no charge. Ten airports have the new iPad-based machines up and running so far. About 90% of the airline’s fliers at those airports use digital boarding passes, said Charu Jain, Alaska’s senior vice president of innovation and merchandising.

Some airline travelers might recall the old days—before the 2007-09 recession—when checked bags were free and it didn’t cost extra to pick a seat. Some low-cost carriers have added physical boarding passes to the nickel-and-diming list.

Breeze Airways charges $3 to print each boarding pass. Allegiant Air charges $5, unless the traveler is a current or retired member of the military. Passengers on Spirit and Frontier airlines can pay as much as $25 for a customer-service representative to print them a boarding pass.

A Frontier spokeswoman said travelers are charged “only for those things you could have done yourself.” Passengers can also pre-purchase help from an airport agent at a reduced price, she added.

Ulster is no Luddite. She uses digital tickets for commuter rail travel and takes the subway using Apple Pay on her phone. She and others just want the security of a piece of paper guaranteeing them a seat on their flight.

Daniel King, a 46-year old cybersecurity consultant who lives outside Boston, believes that having phones replace paper passes contribute to delays at airport checkpoints because of user error. “I think it just causes more chaos than it’s worth,” he said. “When tech works it does save time. The problem is tech doesn’t always work.”

Carl Salmonsen, a 57-year-old retired IT security consultant in Sacramento, normally carries a paper boarding pass as a backup when he travels. On a recent trip, he was at the airport in Puerto Rico ready to return home. This time, he had only his mobile boarding pass.

After standing in the airport security line for about 15 minutes, he discovered his phone had gone into a security lock. It took him five minutes to retrieve his digital boarding pass. By then, the agent with the Transportation Security Administration had gone on a break.

Younger travelers posting on Twitter and Instagram mock passengers who insist on clutching pieces of paper. “If you’re under 65 and have a paper boarding pass, I’m just going to assume you are going to cause delays during my airport experience,” one person tweeted.

Kimyatta Harper, a travel specialist with Exhilarating Travels in Detroit, uses paper boarding passes as a prop when she creates content for TikTok and other social media. She tucks her boarding passes in her passport or holds them in her hand. “I can’t do that with the boarding pass on my cellphone,” she said.

Ben Gold recently returned from an eight-week trip across Southeast Asia with his 15-year-old son. Gold, 56, usually uses his phone to board the plane. For this trip, crossing several countries on multiple airlines, he went the paper route.

Those boarding passes became souvenirs of the father-son adventure. They are now part of a commemorative scrapbook created on a website that allows people to design personal photo albums and have them published for coffee table display.

“It’s ironic that there’s a picture taken, stuck on a website, which then gets printed out,” he said.

Others view their paper boarding pass as a ticket to grand adventures—and a throwback to an era when air travel was more glamorous and enjoyable. Joan Cusick, a 68-year-old photographer and freelance writer in Sacramento, eagerly awaits the moment ahead of every trip when she prints out the boarding passes in her home office.

“Once I have them in my hands,” she said, “I’m on vacation.”

Write to Jacob Passy at jacob.passy@wsj.com