Google Pay's feature set has long lagged behind Apple's Wallet in terms of support for virtual tickets and boarding passes, but that finally appears to be changing (as we recently spotted in teardowns). Today, Google announced on its blog that the Pay app will be getting support for virtual boarding passes, event tickets, and peer to peer money transfers. Boarding passes and tickets have been in soft launch for some time, but that last bit was previously - and quite strangely - relegated to an entirely different app called Google Pay Send, likely a result of it having previously been the Google Wallet app. This should make Pay Send functionally obsolete.

More importantly, you probably want to know which airlines and event services are supporting digital tickets for Pay at launch, and right now it's... not many. There are only two launch partners: Southwest Airlines and Ticketmaster, both of which were part of Google's soft launch months ago. Granted, both are pretty big names in their respective spaces. Google says to count on Eventbrite, Vueling (a low-cost European airline), and Singapore Airlines to join the list soon. Hopefully a lot more services and airlines are in the pipeline, because this is a pretty wimpy first round, if you ask me.

As to the peer to peer money transfers, they work basically like they do in the Pay Send app, but with a new trick: cost splitting. Say you go to the grocery store or a restaurant and want to split the bill with someone - Pay peer to peer transfers will let you easily do that. Pay the bill with Google Pay, open the transaction on your phone in the Pay app, and there'll be a "split the cost" option. You can split a payment with up to five contacts, and they'll be sent a request for the amount owed (it's unclear if you can customize the amount, unfortunately).

For more, check out the official blog post below.