2.4. Electronic tickets and ticketless travel
by Edward Hasbrouck
While airlines promoted e-tickets and ticketless travel as a convenience
to passengers, e-tickets were developed and promoted solely to serve the
interests of the airlines, not those of passengers. For your own protection, insist on
paper tickets whenever possible. They may cost you extra, if they are available at all,
but they are worth it. Most users of e-tickets don’t realize their drawbacks, and wouldn’t use them if
they did and if they still had a choice of paper tickets.
- Flights may still operate when reservation computers are down, but only holders
of paper tickets are transported, since e-tickets can’t be verified offline. E-ticket
holders get left behind.
- E-tickets establish a positive correspondence between reservations and tickets
that doesn’t exist with paper tickets. This enables airlines to crack down on many
tricks that enable people to pay less, such as buying a round-trip ticket for a
one-way journey to avoid paying the higher one-way fare. With an e-ticket — unlike
a paper ticket — the airline can tell that you didn’t use half the ticket. Under
the terms of your ticket purchase contract, they can then bill you for the
difference between the round-trip price you paid and the higher one-way fare for
your actual trip.
- For all tickets paid for by credit card over the Internet or by phone, airlines
reserve the right to inspect the credit card and require the cardholder’s signature
when you check in. Because airlines only make occasional spot checks of credit
cards, most people don’t realize that this is possible. Many people purchase e-
tickets for family members or business associates as a way to avoid the cost and
risk of mailing tickets. But there’s a risk in this: If someone else pays for
e-tickets, and isn’t present with their credit card when you check in, or if you buy your own
tickets but don’t have the credit card you used with you when you check in, you
will be denied boarding unless you can come up with alternate payment on the
spot. This isn’t required with paper tickets. Spot checks of credit cards used to
pay for e-tickets are rare, but they do happen. I’ve seen some very distraught
travellers being turned away from flights paid for as e-tickets by spouses,
colleagues, or other people who weren’t there to show their credit card and sign
a charge slip when they tried to check in.
- For international travel, tickets are required by many countries (including, for
most foreign visitors, the USA) as proof of onward or return transportation for
immigration purposes. Since airlines can’t usually see reservations or e-tickets
on other airlines, onward or return travel on a different airline can only be
demonstrated by a paper ticket. A traveller arriving in a country on one airline,
and leaving on an e-ticket on another, is currently unable to provide any proof of
onward transportation at check-in, and is likely to be refused passage.
- E-tickets are especially disadvantageous in the event of a strike or operational
problem affecting an airline. Normally, major USA airlines honor each others’
tickets (even, in the interest of converting passengers’ loyalties, inexpensive
“nonendorsable” tickets that they are not required to honor) during strikes and
the like. But they can’t access, verify, or honor other airlines’ e-tickets. As
e-ticket
usage has increased, each impending airline strike has prompted an increasingly
overwhelming run on airlines and travel agents of passengers trying to get their
e-tickets printed in order to be able to get them accepted by other airlines during
a strike.
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"Don't believe anything just because you read it on the Internet. Anyone can say anything on the Internet, and they do.
The Internet is the most effective medium in history for the rapid global propagation of rumor, myth, and false information."
(From The Practical Nomad Guide to the Online Travel Marketplace, 2001)
This page published or republished here 1 January 2001; most recently modified 17 October 2020. Copyright © 1991-2024 Edward Hasbrouck, except as noted.
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