Keeping you abreast of what's going on in the
Japanese travel and tourism industries.
News consolidated by Travel Vision, Inc. updated every week.
Respective Airlines Achieve Transition to 100% E-Ticketing in June;
Support for E-Ticketing on Travel Agents' Behalf Varies by Airlines Early-June 2008
The conversion to 100% e-ticketing led by the International Air
Transport Association (IATA) is now scheduled to be completed over
the weekend from May 31 to June 1.
Gathering information about a progress of the transition to
e-ticketing, Travel Vision interviewed on-line carriers in Japan.
Some airlines had achieved only a less than 5% e-ticketing rate by
the end of April this year. On and after June 1, however, as all the
on-line airlines replied, they can manage to complete nearly 100%
e-ticketing, thus the transition seems to be well under way.
Regarding the interline e-ticketing, which has been a burning
issue for some time, 25 airlines out of 27 who responded to Travel
Vision, including those with some reservations, said that they would
meet a request to issue paper tickets, should the system have not yet
been fully built for the e-ticketing.
Building a system for the interline e-ticketing has been
proactively promoted by each and every airline. "Interline e-tickets
can be issued for nearly all airlines," said United Airlines and Air
France-KLM. Korean Air (KE) and Delta Airlines (DL) enjoy the highest
number of interline e-ticketing partners reaching 126 airlines, while
Russia's Transaero Airlines (UN) has only 4.
Regarding agency commission and handling charges, when asked by
travel agents to issue paper tickets, each airline has a different
support toward them. While some airlines still intend to pay agency
commission, charge no handling fees and even absorb cost of mailing
the tickets, other airlines will do entirely the opposite.
When asked by Travel Vision "if paper tickets issued are
commissionable and also count towards an incentive scale," 19
airlines responded with 15 airlines replying in the affirmative and 4
airlines replying in the negative. 5 airlines would charge a
ticketing fee between 1000 yen and 5000 yen.
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