Airline paper tickets to disappear

Goodbye the airline paper ticket. We know you well even if we could never understand what the hell it is about. Now paper airline tickets will soon be phased out of the domestic market according to the the Beijing Daily now that the International Air Transport Association has stopped offering paper tickets for international routes to Chinese sales agencies.

China is expected to become the first country to use only electronic air tickets on both domestic and international routes around the end of this year.

According to the IATA’s plan, all airlines around the world will stop using paper tickets by June 1, 2008, which will save about $2.5 billion annually. For the airlines. For no one else.

IATA launched its drive for e-ticketing more than three years ago and now 84% of travelers on IATA carriers fly without paper tickets.

E-tickets account for 98% of all tickets sold on domestic routes on Ctrip.com, one of China’s largest Web-based travel agencies, and about 50% of international flights.

And is everyone happy with it? With airlines you are forced to work their way. In contrast hotels in China run about 18% of their bookings on the Internet. Which seems to suggest that a lot of people still do not trust direct bookings to work every time. The writer is a member of that intransigent group.