My boyfriend and I traveled from San Francisco to NYC to visit my family for Christmas and meet my newborn niece for the first time. About an hour after takeoff, he started frantically checking his pockets, jacket and bags, only to discover that he had left his driver’s license at the airport.

This presented us with what could have been a major headache when trying to get through security on our way home.

Thankfully, his sister was staying at his apartment and had access to his passport. But she was leaving to drive to their mother’s house that morning, so contacting her couldn’t wait until we landed five hours later.

That’s where Google Voice came in.

We fired up his laptop, connected to in-flight wi-fi (which happened to be free), logged into his Google Voice account, and sent her a text message. Thankfully she hadn’t left his place yet, so we texted her my parents’ address and she headed to the UPS store to have it shipped overnight—and it arrived on our NY doorstep in no time.

Crisis averted thanks to a text from 35,000 feet in the sky.

If you would like to send free text messages from the sky (or comfortably on the ground), log in to your Google Voice account and click the Text button. You can enter a phone number or start typing a name from your Contacts to auto-populate the name and number of the person you are trying to text.



Posted by Michael Bolognino, Product Marketing Manager