The Age of Electronic Ticketing

The Age of Electronic Ticketing

1. Introduction

The need for e-Tickets
Electronic ticketing or e-ticketing is a recent development in the transport industry designed to eliminate the need for paper based ticketing and to facilitate the check-in procedures at airports and train stations. Electronic tickets are travel documents that only exist in the carrier's internal reservation system. E-ticketing has grown rapidly since its inception in 1997, both - due to costs saved by the carriers and the convenience of travelers. During check-in at the airport counter after proper identification, the passenger is issued a boarding pass by referring to the record in the carrier's system, not to a conventional paper-based ticket. IATA (International Air Transport Association) estimates that the cost of the conventional paper ticket is typically US $8 while an electronic ticket costs between US $1 and US $2. The economies arising from the adoption of electronic ticketing have led to the rapid growth of its use.

When airline executives and IT specialists met in a pub in the English Midlands ten years ago to plan the first ever Internet flight booking service, few suspected that this would spawn a revolution in the aviation industry. Electronic ticketing now accounts for 38 per cent of tickets sold worldwide and the International Air Transport Association wants the 265 airlines under its wing to achieve 100 percent paperless ticketing within the next two years.

IATA, has set a revised deadline of 100% compliance to e-tickets by all airlines by May 2008. Most of the Low Cost Carriers (LCC) have adopted 100% e-ticketing although a few exceptions still exist.

IATA says that the industry will save three-billion-dollars annually. Wider use of new electronic technologies for self service check-in, luggage handling and freight could offer even more cost savings in the years to come. Indirect costs associated with paper tickets will decrease as majority of the airlines are adopting e-ticketing.

2. Subject Clarity

E-ticketing generates an electronic record of ticket details and maintains the status of the ticket updated at every stage from the passenger using each of the flight coupons, reconciling post flight payments, processing refunds, to re-issuing or generating management reports. The distribution and supply chain for airlines has also been transformed because of online travel and airlines websites such as Orbitz & Hotwire. The complexity of global electronic ticketing solution is compounded when e-tickets are issued by different legacy based computerized reservation systems. The E-tickets are issued by the host airline agents, common reservation systems and other partner airlines based on bilateral agreements. These e-tickets are then stored in the database. The Passenger Reservation Record in the reservation systems is updated with the electronic ticket number upon its issuance in the e-ticket database. Before departure the Check-in System retrieves the Passenger Name List from the Reservation system. This is interfaced with the e-ticket database to display or update the status of the flight coupon. Utilized coupons are in turn reported to the Revenue Accounting System.

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