Travel plan idea blog

Airlines become entirely ticketless + airline collectibles

If you have a paper ticket to travel by air, you may want to hold on to it – paper tickets may well become a collector’s item. IATA recently announced that all the major airlines will stop issuing paper tickets, effective next summer. Most airlines are already almost entirely electronic – American for example, now estimates that around 98% of its tickets are "e-tickets".

Electronic ticketing is much less expensive for an airline – on average, an electronic ticket costs less than $1 to generate, as opposed to between $10 to $17 for each paper ticket printed. In addition to being less expensive, electronic tickets also make it easier and quicker for the airlines to measure revenue and balance the books. In the past, entire bundles of paper tickets had to be packaged, counted and sent to a processing facility where the data was collected.

Most passengers prefer e-tickets as well – they don’t have to worry about losing their ticket. If you have a paper ticket, airlines generally charge you a fee to replace it or even make you buy a completely new replacement ticket. If you lose the copy of your faxed or e-mailed electronic ticket, the airline will replace it for you – although as the airlines now charge for just about everything, there may be a small charge for that.

If collecting plane tickets doesn’t seem exciting, how about collecting air-sickness bags? You would have to rack up a lot of air miles to surpass the collection of over 5000 bags, by Niek Vermeulen, from the Netherlands, who apparently has collected the most. I was amazed to find just how popular this is; of the many web sites devoted to collecting air sickness bags, http://www.airsicknessbags.com is one of the most intriguing. Fortunately, I have never had to use the air-sickness bag on a plane, but neither have I had the urge to take it with me when I landed.

And how about someone looking into the possibility of electronic passports...? Given the delays this summer in issuing passports, that may be a good idea...

Guest entry by Mancunian

Posted by James Trotta at October 11, 2007 8:52 AM | TrackBack