Dinosaurs, Dodo Birds and Paper Air Tickets

Starting June 1, 2008, you probably won't be able to obtain paper airline tickets, even if you want one. The 240 airlines belonging to the International Air Transport Association will all have switched totally to electronic ticketing. Considering that IATA members account for 94 percent of all international air travel, you can consider the vote for E-ticketing to be a landslide. Three years ago, IATA began encouraging all of its member carriers to switch to E-ticketing. At that time, 16 percent of tickets were issued electronically. Today, it's 84 percent.

Although the initial intention of the changeover was modernization and simplification of processing systems, the paperless ticketing initiative is also environmentally friendly, which is not trivial in the age of increasing environmental consciousness. Before the switch to paperless ticketing, IATA carriers were issuing 400 million tickets a year. Between now and the end of paper tickets, another 16.5 million paper tickets are expected to be used. IATA believes that the changeover will save 50,000 mature trees a year, and it will save a lot of paper from the world's landfills. US domestic carriers have largely switched to E-ticketing over the last few years, and many have eliminated wasteful ticket jackets as well.

What's good for the environment is also good for airlines' bottom lines. IATA believes that each paper ticket costs the airlines $9 per passenger; total anticipated savings for the airlines from E-ticketing will be about $3 billion annually.

The most likely glitch, of course, comes whenever an airport loses electric power or something else causes computer systems to crash. Last month, according to a report in the Los Angeles Times, a computer outage at Los Angeles International Airport shut down the Customs and Border Protection computers for nine hours, stranding 17,000 people on airplanes. That time a government agency was affected. Another time, it could be airlines. Gate agents can pull paper tickets by auxiliary power or flashlight if necessary. With E-tickets, when the system is down, there's nothing to do but wait.