Electronic ticket
Electronic ticket (e-ticket) is a digital agreement between a passenger and an airline for the provision of air transportation services. All information about such an agreement from the moment of booking goes to the carrier's database and is stored in the form of an electronic record. The Itinerary receipt serves as proof of the agreement.
Contents
Electronic tickets processing
Electronic tickets processing takes place on special web-sites with access to airline resources. The option of online booking depends on GDS chosen by the portal for connection. Information about e-tickets goes to the airport computer database, so passenger data is already available at the check-in desk by the time of his arrival. The electronic ticket, like its paper predecessor, does not give the right to board, the passenger must still have a boarding pass. Now it is issued not only in the traditional way - at the check-in desk. Often the passenger can print out the ticket himself after the online registration procedure (on his own printer or at a special kiosk in the airport terminal). Thus, a person traveling with only hand luggage, for example, has the opportunity to go straight to the airport for boarding upon arrival.
First steps
The Americans are pioneers in the transition to electronic ticketing. The first developments in this area date back to the mid-1980s, and the world's first electronic ticket was registered in 1990 on a United Airlines flight. The patent for the invention of the e-ticket is held by Joel Gohin (JRG Airlines, Florida), who is also recognized as a philosopher, writer, poet, painter and author of 150 songs.
In Russia the trial operation of the first electronic ticketing system started in December 2006. The airline that issued the new type of travel documents was UTair from Tyumen. The carrier used the services of domestic GDS Sirena Travel, and the first passengers were UTair employees. The registration for the UTair flight UT464 Tyumen - Moscow was held on December 4 2006 at the Roschino airport. Major Russian airlines Aeroflot, Transaero and S7 were waiting for the spring when the bureaucratic machine gave the e-ticket an official pass into the world of air transportation.
The emergence of e-ticketing was predetermined by the creation of GDS, which shifted the main booking functions into numerical mode. With the transition to the system of electronic ticketing, air carriers received benefits in the form of:
- ease of storage and use of information as a result of eliminating paper forms
- elimination of costs for paper and the creation of systems of protection against fraud
- elimination of costs associated with automated ticket printing and delivery to the point of sale
- simplifying the process of concluding a contract of carriage with a passenger
With the proliferation of the electronic method of making deals for air transportation, the passenger has been able to:
- plan their own travel without having to go to the airline office or ticket office
- to see complete information about flights, comparing prices and flight conditions
- to spend only a few seconds for registration of the ticket, receiving confirmation by e-mail
- not to think about losing or getting theft the ticket
- exchange or refund the ticket online or by phone, if necessary
- letting someone else handle the purchase of the ticket
IATA members changed over to electronic ticketing on June 1, 2008.
Websky e-ticketing module
The module has the following features:
- E-ticketing on flights for which ET mode is available.
- The administrative part of the module allows you to enter restrictions on the checkout with respect to the creation date, departure date and airlines.
- In the administrative part the Airline commissions reference book is available, which allows you to automate the entry of the element airline commission into the ticket mask.
- Information about the issued tickets is stored in the "Orders" database, which allows you to retrieve the necessary information in xml formats.
E-ticket in Websky settings
To configure booking of only e-tickets in Websky you can use the Ticket type in search results option in the section: Avia tickets → Search → Search restrictions. It allows you to filter out from the search results the flights with the absence of the e-ticket attribute in the supplier's response (or if there is no clear indication that the ticket is e-ticket).
Nevertheless, there may be situations when an error like: "Segments cannot be combined with e-ticket and paper ticket (PT NOT COMBINABLE WITH ET)". This means that one of the segments does not support an e-ticket.
Possible reasons for the error:
- You have the "Ticket Type in Search Results" option set to: "Show routes with any ticket type". In this case, you need to change the setting.
- The settings are correct, but your requisites on the provider side are incorrectly configured. In this case, you need to contact your Galileo sales agent to update your settings and get further instructions.
If all these actions did not help and the error still occurs, you should contact Websky technical support and describe the problem in detail.
Terms and their meanings
| Term | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Stock | The available SAFs (strictly accountable forms) for issuing a ticket. |
| Ticketing | Ticketing procedure. |
| Itinerary receipt | A document emulating ticket. It contains data about passengers, fares, taxes, flights, route, electronic ticket number. Itinerary receipt is a document of an arbitrary type, but with a set of minimum data. |
| Validating carrier | Carrier stocks of which are used for issuing of tickets for this carriage. |
| Electronic ticket | A non-documentary form of ticket in which an itinerary receipt is issued in a prescribed form and the passenger is accepted for carriage on the basis of his/her civil documents. |
| Ticket mask (PQ) | Data associated with a PNR (named passenger record or reservation file) that reflects fares, fees, commission, ticket number, etc. |
| Transmission record (Conjunction, Endorcement) | An entry in the ticket specifying a series of information (e.g. Non Ref). Conjunction entries are divided into standard and non-standard. Standard ones are taken from PQ, non-standard ones from applications, but must match the format of the data entry in the transfer record. |
| STN (Stock control number) | Ticket number in the stock. |
| TGTN (Ticketing generated ticket number). | Ticket number assigned at the time of ticketing. |
| Prefix of the airline ticket | Prefix of the validating carrier. |
| Interline | The ability to issue one carrier's carriage on another carrier's letterhead. |
| APIS (Advanced Passenger Information System) | APIS (Advanced Passenger Information System) is a system of additional information about passengers (required by several countries and must be shown on the ticket). |
