Excellent question, and I'm sure you are aware that this IATA project has been underway for many years (current project started in 2004, maybe earlier). The incentive is massive: 100% e-ticketing will save USD 3 billion per year for the airline industry (paper ticket costs USD 10 to process, while e-ticket costs USD 1). Technically IATA has the goal of not interlining paper tickets; the airlines are free to have bilateral arrangements for paper tickets. In fact IATA expects some charter airlines to keep paper tickets or go ticketless instead of e-ticket (rather ironic as new LCCs spear-headed the e-ticket movement, though often not in IATA standard format). It is likely that many cities in the world will not be 100% e-ticket capable by the end of 2007 (the IATA "solution" for this is absurd -- offline ticket lists for such flights!), and all of the airline alliances will have to create a paper ticket "inter-alliancing" process. So what I think will happen is that paper tickets will still exist but limited to alliance airlines. For the OWE product that has zero impact.

There are lots of other aspects to the e-ticket that are high impact for some of us:

- must be issued 3 hours prior to departure time.
- valid for 550 days from date of issue. After that date it is scrubbed from the computer systems (expired/used tickets are kept for 60 days). This cuts into the 2 year validity of OWE tickets, and has the danger of missed flights causing the 60 day scrub to kick in.
- most CRS permit only 1 ticket number per PNR (but allow the last ticket number to be used with a series of tickets). This is a work-around for the 16 segment limit (and the reason that the airlines do not view the 16 segment restriction to be significant; they view it as a training issue.
- ARNK (surface) segments always count as one of the 16 segments.
- open-dated and waitlisted segments are allowed by all of the Oneworld CRS systems, including AA; again a training issue.