How Far We Have Come

When I first started out in this business, we were still handwriting airline tickets. Agencies were required to have a safe and within that safe was stored the ticket stock – one, two and four leg tickets that all had to be accounted for. I was a ticket agent for United Airlines at JFK and when a passenger’s reservation was pulled up, I would go to my ticket drawer and select the appropriate blank ticket and dutifully sign for it before transcribing, by hand, the pertinent flight data. Once that was done, the ticket was positioned into a payment processor whereby I would swipe the ticket so that the credit card made an impression (or just wrote cash or check in the “payment” section) and then placed the ticket between the jaws of  the “validator” which was a device that held the airline plates and then I whacked the top of the validator which stamped the ticket and made it officially acceptable for the respective flights. Remember, in those days there were no online booking tools, and all tickets were handwritten unless it was a complicated international itinerary and those were done the night before by the midnight crew due to their complexity.

The airline plates noted above were issued by each airline to a travel agency so that the agent would place the appropriate plate into the validator to make the ticket acceptable to the respective airline. I can remember as an airline sales rep getting the dreaded tap on the shoulder from my manager because he received a call from ARC that an agency was in arrears in their ARC reporting or had a huge amount of outstanding debit memos and that I was assigned the unpleasant task of visiting that agency to pull their plates, essentially putting them out of business until the issue was resolved.

Business travel was quite a bit different. Some of the larger corporate accounts had what were called “write your own” tickets and those were single flight coupons/tickets that came in a pad and when a business traveler had a reservation for a flight he or she could just show up at the gate, tear out a ticket and fill it out right there and board the plane.

We also had STPs – Satellite Ticket Printers - that were situated at the corporation’s location, and these would print out the ticket either directly from the airline or the travel agency. The highest level of service that any corporation or business traveler could expect back then came from an on-site configuration whereby the travel agency would have a ticketing and reservation staff located right on the company’s premises. I can even remember one version of the on-site whereby the agency had to locate their satellite office across the street from the entrance because it was a government quasi-military operation with secret projects.

So much has changed since then.

There are no more handwritten tickets and validators and plates. No exhaustive auditing of ticket stock and tedious manual ARC reports. Now, the business travelers simply call the agency or use their online booking tool and then print off their own ticket/boarding pass at home. And just when we thought it couldn’t get any easier than that, most of us now board our flights by simply flashing our smart phone with a QR Code to a reader at the boarding gate.

I think I can say with some confidence that none of us misses it. I especially don’t miss the time spent scrubbing the ink off my hands from all that carbon paper that was part of the old manual ticketing process. Handwriting airline tickets was tedious and time consuming and I can’t imagine the process of airline ticketing and boarding getting any more convenient than it is now unless, and there are emerging discussions, the future of air travel might involve biometrics. This technology could revolutionize the boarding process by utilizing facial recognition or retinal scanning. This means passengers would no longer need physical or even digital tickets. Instead, a quick scan of their face or eyes would grant them access to their seats, making the entire journey even smoother and more efficient. How far we have come…

Mark Altman
Forte Business Travel Solutions
516-624-0500 x5072
maltman@travelsavers.com