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Thread: How often do airline booking record locators get "recycled"?
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Old Nov 15, 2015 | 7:58 am
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skywardhunter
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Originally Posted by Efrem
PNRs are airline-specific. Two airlines can have PNRs of 123ABC with no risk of confusion. To get a unique trip identifier, you need to use the combination of airline code and PNR. That raises the number of possible combinations a great deal. While large airlines obviously use more of their possible codes than smaller ones, even they only use a small fraction of the available combinations in the course of 12 months.
That certainly raises the bar. Delta is the #1 passenger-carrying airline according to Wiki with about 113m pax p.a. Even if everyone travelled on a separate PNR they could run for 20 years before running out of options...

I always assumed it was linked to the booking engine, e.g. all airlines on Amadeus would have the same pool of references.
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