Reuters reports that IATA, which supplies paper tickets to most airlines outside the U.S., plans to discontinue supplies by the end of this year. Airlines that want to maintain it after this year will be able to, but the supplies will be costly.
IATA estimates that 96 percent of tickets issued by U.S. Airlines are electronic, while globally the number is 77 percent. This number does not take into account the many travel agencies in the US that still issue as paper.
Many travel agents issue passengers the old-style paper tickets “in case there is a problem,” as the Detroit News mentions in its narrative of one college student who has never flown on one before. The biggest advantage of a paper ticket was that it could be endorsed over to another carrier much more easily than electronic tickets. However, electronic tickets can now be endorsed over to other carriers, but it now requires an agent. You can no longer just walk over to the other carrier and ask them if they’ll take it.
Practically, if you have a paper ticket you have a bigger hassle. If you have a paper ticket, you lose out on some of the advantages of electronic ticketing…online checkin, self-service checkin…and the fact that if you want to change, you don’t have to get your ticket back to an airline office or ticket counter. And if you lose a paper ticket….you are really in trouble…
On average, an airline spends $10 to process a paper ticket and $1 to process an electronic ticket. As paper tickets become less popular, the costs associated with them will increase. The biggest problems associated with avoiding paper tickets are interline eticketing…where an airline issues an electronic ticket including flights on another airline. It takes a monetary investment to unify these systems.