This is what I've been told long in the past, so you can take it for what it's worth.

The structure of the system with PNR's holding all of the different information in/on it is a refugee from the days before computers at the airline offices. My understanding is that at that time they used file cards of some sort on which the reservation information was written/typed. The card was known as the Passenger Name Record.

Each of these cards (PNR's) had to have some sort of code so that it could be filed and retrieved by the people in the office. That code became known as the "record locator," which makes sense. Given the number of cards a major airline like TWA or Pan Am must have had in their New York reservations offices, they must have desperately needed help locating the things.

As I recall, at least on UA's Apollo for travel agents, there are 4 things that must be in the record - Name, Passenger telephone contact number, Name of the agent who made the reservation and the date that the reservation is expected to be ticketed. Everything else, which can be a lot if your corporate travel agency has a profile established for your company and a profile for you, the individual traveler, is optional. Even (on Apollo) the flights are optional. You can have a whole slew of different contact numbers, including one for each city. My experience, however, is that UA will only call the first number on the list regardles of which numbers are flagged for which cities. Because of that, I always make sure my cell phone number is first when I'm roaming around the US, b/c I know I'll at least have that phone with me, and I'm more likely to get it there than having to call in for my voice mail at the office all the time.

The PNR's, though, are tied to actual reservations. If you travel on all the segments, or there are no segments in the record, the record will get swept out of active visibility on the system. Clearly they get retained somewhere deep in Tulsa, Minneapolis, etc., but the average agent can't see them. So if some agent puts something nasty in your PNR, it wouldn't be there forever. Your travel agent could put something nasty in your profile, but that would be silly. I don't actually know how the profiles that UA is supposed to keep for premiers actually works, b/c I've never had them figure out that I like an aisle seat, regardless that I've told them in the different forms they send over the years.

In answer to JRF's conspiracy theories, even paranoids have enemies sometimes. This just talks about what information is available in the actual PNR. There's plenty of other information available to airport/CTO agents just by looking elsewhere, like the FF account, like Dalguy says. I've never been an airline employee, so I don't know how much or how difficult it is to see it.

Phew, that was longer than I expected.

Greg


[This message has been edited by greg99 (edited 07-30-2000).]