The end of the paper airline ticket

ISTANBUL -- While skyrocketing jet fuel prices have created a crisis of epic proportions in the airline industry, top airline executives from around the globe gathered in Istanbul last weekend for a ceremony commemorating a more positive milestone: the end of the paper airline ticket. At a time when airlines have raised fares or tacked on fees for everything from excess baggage to seat selection, the elimination of paper airline tickets stands to reduce airline costs by as much as $3 billion worldwide and cut the cost of issuing a ticket from $10 to $1, according to Bryan Wilson of the International Air Transport Association (IATA).

"If you have a paper ticket, it's time to donate it to a museum," said IATA CEO and Director General Giovanni Bisignani prior to the opening of the association's annual meeting. As of June 1, IATA will no longer supply paper ticket stock to 60,000 travel agencies in 125 countries around the world as it has done for decades.

Many American travelers may think that paper airline tickets are already extinct, as most U.S. airlines stopped issuing paper tickets for domestic flights some years ago. But in other parts of the world, and particularly for international itineraries involving multiple airlines, paper tickets are more common and it's taken 13 years from the time the first electronic ticket was issued in 1994 to the eradication of paper ticket stock issued by IATA. When IATA began its push for electronic ticketing in 2004 only 18% of airline tickets issued by IATA airlines worldwide were electronic.

But the acceptance of electronic tickets has not been an easy sell. In 1990, when I was tasked by United Airlines to help build a product to allow consumers to book their travel online, no one in the airline's management believed that paper tickets could disappear. "People need the security of a paper ticket," they insisted, even when I noted that travelers didn't need a paper document to rent a car or a hotel room.

Several years prior to the rise of the Internet, consumers were beginning to shop through proprietary online systems like CompuServe and Prodigy. Although these early online systems were quite rudimentary by today's standards, booking travel seemed like a natural online application. But it was also immediately evident that the paper airline ticket was a major barrier to online adoption and an expensive proposition for timely delivery.