Please check your boarding pass for … ads

Flying to New York? How about making a reservation at your favorite restaurant before you print your boarding pass?

Sojern Inc., a new company that has struck a deal with Northwest Airlines and five other major carriers, will sell ads synced to travelers' itineraries.

Delta Air Lines will launch the product today on flights to Las Vegas, so passengers will get online boarding passes that include ads for shows, restaurants and golf courses in Las Vegas. Later this week, the ads will show up on boarding passes across Delta's domestic flight schedule. At Northwest, the ads are expected to begin in four to five months.

"We think it won't be intrusive," said Al Lenza, Northwest's vice president of distribution and e-commerce. Customers who don't want the ads can skip the offers, but those who do will be able to buy theater tickets or make restaurant reservations by clicking links before they print their passes.

Others may choose to simply print out their passes, and they'll have the ads and some contact phone numbers when they take their passes with them.

Passengers will only get the ads on airline websites, such as nwa.com, not when they check in at airports.

Gordon Whitten, an Omaha-based businessman and the founder and CEO of Sojern, got the idea for the ads on boarding passes when he was traveling to and from California on business trips. He saw people walking through airports with boarding passes with plenty of "white space" on them and he viewed them as empty billboards.

Another $3.3 million is coming from smaller investors. Duane Woerth, former president of the Air Line Pilots Association who flew for Northwest, is among the investors and he's taken on a full-time role as a senior vice president with Sojern.

Woerth is a Nebraska native. His relatives linked him to Whitten, who was looking for somebody who could make deals with the big airlines.

"When I first approached Northwest and Delta, they were just coming out of bankruptcy," Woerth said in an interview.

But he added that major airlines were receptive to the idea, particularly because they are looking for new sources of revenue at a time when their fuel bills have skyrocketed.

By relying on Sojern, Woerth said, "It does not require the airlines to tie up scarce technical resources or design expensive systems to deliver a product."

So far, Northwest, Delta, American, Continental, United and US Airways have signed deals to do business with Sojern, which will be headquartered in Omaha.

Sojern did not disclose what cut the airlines will get, but Lenza said it will be "many millions of dollars for each airline."

At some point, Sojern's Carey Rademacher said airline customers will be able to answer profile questions, so they can share their preferences for food, music, sports and other entertainment options. Then those customers would receive even more targeted ads.

The company said that it will not release data on individual customers to advertisers, but the information would be used by Sojern to get the right ads to specific customers.

In particular, Woerth said the ads will help "the road warrior who doesn't have time to sit in front of Google and look stuff up" before a business trip.

Some well-known business people are involved in the Sojern effort. Jeffrey Katz, founding CEO and former chairman of Orbitz, is among Sojern's board members.