Next time you are issued a paper ticket for a flight, don’t throw it away – it could become a museum piece. Airlines are going all out to consign the paper ticket to a dusty shelf in the cupboard of obsolete technology.
Most low-cost airlines have only ever issued electronic tickets and now mainstream carriers are catching up. In Europe, the lead has been taken by British Airways, which on April 1, stopped printing paper tickets for trips that are, in its vocabulary, ‘e-ticketable’.
The move has had an instant effect: the proportion of tickets issued as e-tickets by BA rose to 72 per cent in April, up from 62 per cent in March and 49 per cent a year ago. In announcing its full year results on May 17, the airline said that in the UK, two out of every three BA customers are now travelling with an e-ticket. So far this year, the airline has installed 191 new self-service kiosks around its network.
An e-ticket is generated electronically within an airline’s reservation system with a receipt usually e-mailed to the passenger. Unlike a paper ticket, a receipt is not a financial instrument which means it cannot be lost or stolen. That also means it can be printed out several times, a useful benefit for absent-minded travellers, who can make duplicates to keep in their luggage and about their person.
BA plans to make its entire network e-ticketable by the end of this year and is driving forward its ambition. In April, three-quarters of itineraries booked on BA were e-ticketable: the shortfall is due to the fact that a small number of routes do not yet have the necessary technology, or there are itineraries that include flights on other carriers. However, although travellers can no longer obtain paper tickets at any price on e-ticketable routes when booking directly from BA, they can procure one for £25 by booking through a travel agent.
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In practice, few business travellers are prepared to pay that sort of money; their employers even less so. “We have seen a massive take-up in e-tickets since 1 April,” says Barry Fleming, head of customer development at the business travel agency Portman Travel. “Very few customers insist on being given paper tickets. For a company whose employees take hundred or even thousands of trips per week, it would be an enormous cost to bear.”
E-tickets are generally considered to be a genuine improvement on their paper predecessors. “E-ticketing is very effective,” says Tom Stone, chairman of the Institute of Travel Management. “It eliminates courier costs and means tickets can no longer be lost.” Other benefits pointed out by BA include the ability to book and amend trips at shorter notice.
Yet in spite of the manifest advantages, fears about e-ticketing linger. Chris Turnbull, senior partner with Scholefield Turnbull & Partners, which specialises in handling travel for board-level executives, says some of his customers are still prepared to pay £25 for the privilege of paper.
There are others who feel uneasy too, especially travellers to destinations in developing countries, such as Karen Bellis, manager of Shell LiveWire, a global programme run by Shell to encourage young entrepreneurs. “E-tickets are one less thing to lose and I have never had any problems with them,” she says. “But there are times and places when I do like the reassurance of them as proof that I can get out of the country.”
Turnbull agrees with BA that e-tickets work well but believes travellers should not be forced to use them unless they feel comfortable. “Why should passengers pay a supplement just to ease an airline’s cost of sale?” he asks. “Airlines have become so inward-facing over cost that they don’t give a stuff for the customer at all.”
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There is no doubt that the main reason airlines for the change is the cost. It is estimated carriers save £3-£4 per trip by avoiding paper, hence the £25 “fine” for any travel agent which issues a paper ticket. Richard Lovell, executive vice-president of Carlson Wagonlit Europe, said: “BA shouldn’t disguise it as a ‘fine’ - it is just a premium, an increase in price. We have a lot of travellers who are very unhappy at the idea of not having a paper ticket but BA is simply making them more expensive because it is more expensive for the airline to have them.”
Alex McWhirter, consumer editor for the magazine Business Traveller, is concerned that airlines lack back-up when their systems go wrong. He recently travelled on an e-ticket-only early-morning flight from Stansted with Air Berlin when the system of the carrier’s handling company, Servisair, failed. Staff had to write out tickets by hand for each passenger, resulting in an 80-minute delay to departure.
Ted Moss, BA’s e-ticketing programme director, says his airline has made thorough preparations for scrapping paper, both politically and technically. “We have notified port authorities and embassies and to date we have had no negative response from any of them,” he says. “We have also put many contingencies in place in case systems go down, especially in Africa. We have checked all this in advance rather than waited for problems to arise.”
Portman confirms the switch to e-ticketing has been pain-free. “There have been no big red flags so far,” says Fleming.
Meanwhile, the proportion of e-ticketable itineraries is set to grow as BA extends the technology to trips that include other airlines. Itineraries which also involve American Airlines and Qantas were made e-ticketable in April and BA hopes to widen the arrangement to all other members of the Oneworld Alliance – which includes Aer Lingus and Iberia – and a handful of other carriers by the end of this summer.
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Will you miss having a paper ticket? Email your comments to businesstravel@thetimes.co.uk.
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