Originally Posted by
HeathrowGuy
To be sure, CO has similar capabilities for ticketing as other legacies. CO agents can and do "instant ticket" most bookings -- the only time delays come into play are: 1) for some interline bookings where agents have to manually build the pricing record (less of a problem now as CO has worked to incorporate most if not all Star member carriers into its automated pricing and ticketing IT infrastructure); 2) for some interline bookings where CO does not have an instant availability arrangement with the other airline, requiring a 24-hour delay in ticketing (it's cleaner to wait and ticket rather than ticket immediately and risk cancelled segments) and 3) payment verification issues.
CO.com doesn't even instant ticket most itineraries.
If you were to go to co.com and buy a flight, and in a separate window go to united.com and buy the same flight (UAL coded), chances are you'll have the UA ticket much faster than the CO ticket, simply because UA will instantly ticket it within the purchase transaction, while CO will queue it.
The bigger I've had is not in ticketing, but in SHARES communication with other airline reservations systems. As I mentioned a few months back, I had a huge cluster.... with a OnePass award booking on SQ because SHARES simply stopped communication with Kriscom - thus, I had a ticket, but no reservation on SQ. An SQ agent at SIN had to force-book me in Y onto SIN-IAH, but the needful got done after much hassle and an expensive call back to Houston.
That's a separate, and bigger issue, and it may not be even SHARES related. US, for example, uses SHARES and does not seem to have as many of these issues, so I'm thinking there's something in the way CO has it setup.