Business Travelers Balk at 'Hassle Factor' on E-Tickets
As business travel starts to pick up, some regular travelers have been reluctant to fly because of confusion about airport security procedures for the use of electronic tickets, the National Business Travel Association said yesterday.
"There are a couple of things that have been keeping some business travelers away," said Marianne McInerney, the executive director of the association, which represents about 2,000 corporate travel managers. One hurdle is overall concern about security, she said. But a more specific obstacle, she added, is "what they are perceiving to be the hassle factor" in using e-tickets, which now account for more than two-thirds of the tickets that airlines issue to business.
The problem, she and others said, began a few days after the terrorist attacks when airports reopened with tighter security measures, including blocking from inner terminals everyone except those passengers with tickets.
To pass through security, a holder of an e-ticket needs to show a printed itinerary, or a receipt, from an airline or a travel agency or online travel site. The customer often receives these itineraries by fax or by printing them out from a travel Web site.
Especially in the first week after airports reopened, some passengers complained that security agents were not accepting itinerary printouts and were instead requiring them to go to airline ticket counters for paper boarding passes before they could enter departure areas. Though security agents are now generally accepting printed itineraries as proof, travel managers said, some confusion remains.
Policies on electronic tickets differ "from airline to airline and airport to airport," said Ms. McInerney, whose group is working with the airline industry on e-ticket policies and the matter of standardizing itineraries and receipts, perhaps with a universal template to create more readily verifiable printouts that carry uniform information like a ticket number that can be matched to an airline computer reservation.
"The airlines have invested a lot in making the use of e-tickets a very easy way to travel," she said, "but now the policies must be married into the security process across the board."
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/09/28/business/28TRAV.html