No more paper tickets on foreign routes from today

While airlines in India have braced themselves up for global implementation of 100 per cent e-ticketing by the International Air Transport Association (IATA) effective June 1, 2008, the travel industry says India will take years before it goes entirely paper less on the domestic routes.

There is work in progress on this front, though. The IAAI (IATA Agents Association Of India) will shortly make a presentation to the civil aviation ministry on how the government could facilitate e-ticketing domestically.

"I know there are issues involved but we need to address them. I was recently in Baroda, Gujarat, and on the airport, I saw the display board was being handled manually. The arrival and departure time of flights had not been changed for a day," said a senior IATA official who did not want to be quoted.

"Indian geography does not support it. Many people do not have access to an Internet connection. They do not have identity cards, too. How do you plan to resolve security issues involved? Going paper less on the domestic route will need concerted efforts from the Ministry of Civil Aviation and the government," he added.

E-ticketing will help reduce workload, increase efficiency and quality for airlines. "It will reduces cost as it does away with the conventional paper system,'' said Tarique Khatri, vice- president (business development), Cleartrip, an online travel agency.

It is estimated that an airline spends Rs 300-400 in processing each paper-ticket. Currently, about 15 per cent of all the tickets issued in India are paper tickets.

Cleartrip, which operates on domestic routes, says that with e-ticketing coming in force, its processing time will become better. "Our processing time of a (paper) ticket will reduce from 48 hours to 15 minutes flat," add Khatri.

The agency will also do away with maintaining a stock of 1,500 paper tickets it uses every fortnight.

On the international front, airlines have put all infrastructure in place to support IATA's global implementation of 100 per cent e-ticketing.

Air India and Jet Airways have already signed interline agreements for e-ticketing with international airlines.