Originally Posted by
seat38a
I still don't really understand this. Tickets were paper, but still there were records of your reservation on a computer somewhere.
1. If you lost your ticket, whats was the difference then and now? They are both papers and there's a record in a central computer/office somewhere? Couldn't someone just call reservation and tell them that their ticket was lost, and have it voided and reissued?
2. What about non refundable fares or if you missed your flight or cancelled?
3. Whats the difference between an e-ticket now and the reservation system of the past? What suddenly made the piece of paper worthless and reprintable as many times as you want? The words "Electronic Ticket" printed on your printout can't be all of it.
So, I can at least address this from experience with Amtrak until a few years back (may whomever made e-tickets work for them miss their next train):
-The ticket was not considered "issued" until it was printed off in some form.
--In theory, there was a refund fee...but due to how Amtrak's system (didn't) work, if you axed it before printing, that fee didn't tend to apply (since the ticket hadn't been "issued").
-However, once it was printed off, it was basically a negotiable document and utter hell to get refunded.
--You could only print it off once. Once you had printed it, you basically had a check from the airline, good for either travel from A to B or for the cash amount, in your hand.
-At least before some point, non-refundable fares weren't a thing (Amtrak's system simply didn't make that "stick" because of how it worked). On the airline front this tended to lead to them calling to "re-confirm" a reservation (since they couldn't sock you for a refund fee and if you weren't flying they wanted to re-sell the seat).
So, for example, I once "splashed" about a $2500 Amtrak trip the night before travel when a key part of the ticket blew up. I still traveled one leg (Richmond, VA-New York) and reversed that evening since I couldn't cancel without going to the station (I found out about the problem after midnight) and figured "What the hell, might as well take that leg if I've got to go up there". Today, that trip would have been non-refundable and I would have gotten soaked in the refund fees.
I once made a half-joking remark about using unprinted Amtrak tickets as a store of money for the unbanked. I can't say how well it mapped to airline tickets, but it was sure a godsdamned nice situation to be in and "fixing" it to the benefit of the airline is one of many things I despise the IT industry for.