Moving the airline industry towards 100% e-ticketing has been no easy feat. There were challenges along the way and some hurdles still remain
After one extension and lots of hard work, IATA's 31 May deadline for 100% electronic ticketing has been and gone. The industry body is describing it as a "complete success", although several factors have meant that the actual rate of global e-ticketing falls just short of the target at 96.5%. "We don't expect to get literally up to 100% until we take the paper stock away," says Bryan Wilson, project director of e-ticketing at IATA. "Until this point it will not go above 96.5%."
Wilson lists four main reasons for the shortfall, starting with travel agents. "As long as travel agents have paper tickets there will always be someone who gives a paper ticket rather than an e-ticket," he says. The second issue relates to interline e-ticketing, where smaller carriers have found themselves at the bottom of the pile when it comes to migrating existing interline agreements to e-ticketing. About 10% of interline agreements have not been migrated.
Another reason for not quite hitting the 100% target is that a small number of carriers have simply refused to use e-ticketing. "About 15 airlines say it's not appropriate for them," says Wilson. "It sounds like quite a lot but these are airlines that make up less than 0.1% of the total BSP volume." The final issue relates to airlines that still have work to do on the e-ticketing front. "You don't manage to get 350 airlines to move to a new way of distributing their product without there being that small bit [that does not quite make it]," says Wilson. "But this is a very small volume and there is a way around all of this. For example, for travel agents that can't find a journey with airlines that have e-ticketing, they can take the booking and request the airline to issue a paper ticket."
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Smaller airlines have found it particularly difficult to achieve 100% e-ticketing. For instance, Air Seychelles admits that it has found the process extremely challenging and as a result has not quite managed to meet the deadline. "The entire process has been long and arduous and we must not for one minute think that it is over and all plain sailing," says Air Seychelles executive chairman David Savy. "The entire exercise has been capital and human resource intensive to say the least. As a small airline it has been particularly difficult given our human capital and financial outlay."
Never Too Late
But for airlines that haven't made the cut, the message from Sue Powers, chief information officer at global distribution system provider Travelport, is don't give up. "To airlines that haven't made the deadline, you certainly shouldn't give up hope," says Powers. "We will continue to offer solutions to new airlines coming on board after the IATA deadline. We will dedicate additional resources to getting them online as soon as possible."
It is not just smaller airlines that have felt the challenge in the move to e-ticketing but also entire geographic regions. IATA's Wilson points to four regions that caused particular anxiety in the run-up to the deadline: China Africa the Middle East/North Africa and the Commonwealth of Independent States.
"In Africa the question was: how many of the smaller, operationally fragile airlines that are worried about meeting IOSA targets would be able to do e-ticketing?" says Wilson. "We gave a lot of help to them and we signed Kenya Airways to act as a consultant to provide specific help to African carriers." This technique worked and African carriers were up to 90% and rising as of late May.
Another challenge, particularly in the Middle East, was cultural, according to Frédéric Spagnou, vice-president of Amadeus' airline business group: "The issue was that people were used to handing over money and getting an official-looking paper ticket. These problems had to be removed one by one."
Time pressures were also an issue for the GDSs. "We had to develop the solution," says Spagnou. "There are a limited number of providers so there was a huge ramp-up in demand in a limited timeframe."
IATA expects e-ticketing to save the industry $3 billion a year.
For more on e-ticketing and other Simplifying the Business initiatives, see our IATA Dailies: flightglobal.com/iata
Source: Airline Business
