E-Tickets Usage Is Up, Interlining Months Away

<B> E-Tickets Usage Is Up, Interlining Months Away</B>

By Jay Campbell

Sources at Star Alliance carriers are disputing a report that indicated that they would establish an alliance-wide electronic ticket system, including interlining, by Jan. 1, 2000.

Aviation Daily last week quoted Dietmar Kramer, a Lufthansa general manager in Asia, as saying the system "will see all the partner carriers interline-compliant with one another. The goal is to have entirely ticketless travel in the entire Star Alliance network."

The trade publication for airline managers and employees noted that Kramer was a recent appointee, which led sources to believe he was talking out of turn. "Clearly we're looking at it, but no plans have been finalized," said one distribution manager. "There's been a lot of work, mainly in the United States, to establish bilateral e-ticket interlining, but multilateral is a heck of a challenge."

E-ticket interlining will allow buyers to issue seats on more than one airline on a single e-ticket. It also will allow travelers to exchange e-tickets on one airline for those on another, without having to ask the first airline to print a ticket. The lack of such service has been the single largest stumbling block to business usage of e-tickets (<I>BTN,</I> Oct. 28, 1996), although that usage is climbing.

A United Airlines spokesman said it and American Airlines have pushed back their target date for e-ticket interlining to the fall. In an unusual joint announcement about this time last year (<I>BTN,</I> May 18, 1998), the archrival carriers said they were aiming for this summer.

At the same time, Continental Airlines and America West promised to beat them to the punch, and sources said that may yet happen. "We're sizing up how we can work with Continental on that once they finish with America West," said Al Lenza, vice president of distribution planning at Northwest Airlines, a Continental alliance partner. "I think they've just about wrapped that up."

Lenza's counterpart at Continental, staff vice president of distribution planning Steve Cossette, was reluctant to comment on the status of the work, noting that the airlines will make a "big to-do" about it when it happens. Cossette's most recent assessment (<I>BTN,</I> Feb. 22) targeted the third quarter, though he also said at the time that programming for interlining is a bigger job than the development of e-ticketing itself.

According to the Airlines Reporting Corp., 32.3 percent of tickets processed in March were electronic, up from 25 percent in July. Some individual companies have reported even higher rates. Santa Clara-based 3Com, for example, in January began pushing e-tickets as its preferred method of distribution, and usage at the company has climbed since then from 10 percent to more than 50 percent.

Meanwhile, foreign carriers like British Airways and Lufthansa are beginning to catch up to U.S. airlines in the establishment and rollout of e-ticketing. Several U.S. carriers now offer e-tickets on most or all of their routes, but some notable foreign airlines have yet to introduce it at all. Air France, for example, is just beginning to establish the right systems.