09.14
I’m old enough to remember when airlines used to issue tickets for all travel. I also remember when they moved to a ticket-less system that became known as ‘e-tickets’ which was met with mass confusion by everyone involved including the airlines themselves.
The biggest benefit, we were told, was that we didn’t require any actual tickets so everything would run much more smoothly. And it did, for a while.
In the past few weeks I’ve had to travel internationally a couple of times and both times I’ve been asked for my ‘itinerary’. On both occasions I’ve not had one of them and been made to go to another desk in order to get one. Also, on both occasions I’ve been told off for not printing out my itinerary at home. I’ve tried to argue that this was never made a condition of travel before and that surely, isn’t this the very reason they stopped actually issuing tickets in the first place? But, to no avail and so it seems that a ‘ticket of sorts’ is once again required for airline travel.
Only this time round, it’s our paper and ink that is being used. And if you don’t have a printer? Then go to a ticketing desk first, before you queue up for 2 hours to check in only to find you don’t have the right paperwork.
(One last niggle: why does checking in for an international flight in the UK take so fucking long when they can do it in a fraction of the time in the US? Just because we’re British, doesn’t mean we actually like queuing!)
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