E-Tix Interlining Standard Nears

<B> E-Tix Interlining Standard Nears</B>

By Amon Cohen

<I>London</I> - One of travel managers' biggest objections to electronic ticketing will be removed within the next 12 months when airlines reach an agreement on interlining.

News that rapid progress is being made towards an electronic interlining standard was revealed at a conference on international e-ticketing and smart cards held here in early March. Not a week later, United Airlines provided evidence for one of the conference's key points--that the acceptance of e-ticketing is growing rapidly--in announcing its first-ever transpacific e-ticketing.

United will make e-tickets available for sale on flights between the United States and Japan after April 2. They also will be available for sale beginning April 6 for flights after May 1 between the United States and Australia and New Zealand.

Despite the e-ticket surge, the Utopian prospect of an all-in-one travel smart card appears as remote as when the concept was first outlined in the middle of the decade. In spite of efforts coordinated by the likes of the International Air Transport Association, the world's governments and computer and travel companies are nowhere near agreeing on standards that would create a single card that combines functions such as air payment, ticket, passport and expense management.

United Airlines Atlantic division distribution manager Mike Tunnicliffe told those at the London conference that e-ticket interlining will become reality either later this year or at the beginning of 1999.

At present, passengers cannot use e-tickets unless their entire itinerary is with the same carrier and every segment of the journey is e-ticketable. Likewise, passengers with e-tickets who switch their flights to a different carrier must have a new, paper ticket issued, making the process extremely cumbersome for them.

Tunnicliffe reported that under the auspices of IATA, work is proceeding smoothly both on validating boarding for interlining passengers and for financial settlement. Although any such agreement will be universal, there is a strong chance that Star Alliance members will agree on a standard at an earlier date; even before that, a deal is likely to be struck in the United States between United and American Airlines.

The advent of interlining will remove yet another barrier to e-ticketing. Another problem fast disappearing is the printing of the Warsaw Convention on tickets for international routes flown with e-tickets by several carriers, including British Airways, Lufthansa, SAS and United.

Many of these airlines are circumventing the difficulty by publishing the convention in their frequent-flyer handbooks. Passengers who are not members of such schemes are having the details faxed to them when the e-ticket is raised.

Conference chairman Kevin Gomes, transport & travel manager for IBM Smart Card Solutions, had revealed earlier that e-tickets reduce processing costs for airlines from $8 to $1. But United's Tunnicliffe held out scant hope of any financial benefits being passed on directly to customers, even if they want to cut e-ticket-only deals with airlines. "If a large corporate came to us with that proposal, it would be looked at but I always have trouble with the argument that savings should be passed on directly," he said. '"E-ticketing is a massive investment that we need to recoup and any savings we make are not kept as profit but are ploughed back into the business."

Tunnicliffe asserted that the passengers benefit from e-tickets because they can change their itineraries without having to visit the airline ticket desk (assuming no interlining is required) and because they no longer have the responsibility of carrying a valuable document. "The convenience of mobility leads to cost-savings for the consumer," he claimed.

There was little comfort either on another travel manager gripe about e-ticketing: the refunding of unused e-tickets. Refunding is technically straightforward with most airline e-ticket systems but travelers are less likely to remember to claim the refund if they do not have the physical unused ticket to remind them.

There seems little prospect at present of airlines doing the work on behalf of customers. "We are not surveying our records because it is not going to make us money to do that," one airline executive acknowleged to BTN.

Conference attendees learned of some smart card developments. Hewlett-Packard has developed a laptop with a built-in smart card reader and British Airways and Philips are testing a card at London's Gatwick airport that allows passengers to be tracked around the airport to eliminate boarding delays.

The message from speaker after speaker, however, was clear: The current lack of standards for interlining remains an enormous stumbling block.

"The overwhelming majority of smart card products are not operable outside their own program," said Dunstan Sheldon, president of aviation technology consultancy Sheldon & Associates, adding that even Visa's pilot projects around the world are not interoperable. "The most important challenge in our industry today is to get interoperability. We need to achieve any function, any time, any place and it has got to be of benefit to the user or they are not going to use it. Instead, everyone is trying to be first and grab the limelight.