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TRAVELLER'S TALES
The trap in e-ticketing
DON ROSS
Electronic tickets are supposed to usher in an era of trouble-free travel for everyone when they finally relegate paper tickets to the garbage bin mid-2008. There are now hints that it is not working out exactly as the airlines thought.
Apparently travel agents are yet again blotting their copy book by cheating consumers, who take it for granted that an e-ticket is fraud-proof. They are not and some unfortunate passengers are finding out it can be a very costly affair.
Travellers generally accept that the e-ticket is a vast improvement on the printed coupons that have been in use since commercial aviation took off. We can lose the print-out and as along we have the code in our mobile phone or written down on a scrap of paper, we can still board our flights.
Airlines love to tell us how many billions of dollars they will save by cutting out ticket printing, while they labour the point that e-tickets are as about as fraud proof as a travel booking could ever be. Well that's the official line from the International Air Transport Association, the agency that is driving the migration to 100% e-ticketing by May 2008.
Travel agents blew the whistle on a few unscrupulous colleagues who were preying on passenger ignorance, juggling the e-ticketing codes and running off with the cash before the passenger discovered he had been duped. The culprits are fly-by-night operators who are not registered with IATA as full-fledged travel agencies.
They are an evolution of what was once termed the old-fashioned bucket shop. A travel agent rented a desk, attached a bucket and rope to the ceiling to safeguard his cash and he was in business at least for a day if the takings were good. Today, cheats need a mobile phone and a laptop to accomplish the same hit and run feats with consumers.
A travel agent can issue a bogus e-ticket code take your cash and hope you will not find it out until you reach the airline check-in counter.
At least one example of this kind of cheating was reported in local newspapers, earlier this month, when a group of National Defence College students discovered the tickets they had bought, from a registered travel agency, were nothing more than a booking code rather than a payment receipt ensuring the right to travel.
But rumours abound that other travel agents in Bangkok have discovered enough loop holes in the way e-tickets are processed to dupe consumers.
If there was ever a time when travel agents should be convincing travellers that they are professional and reliable it is probably now. We can all book tickets directly with the airlines via their Internet web sites. Why would we continue to use travel agents if there is the slightest possibility we could be cheated? Travel agency credibility is at stake. Many travellers view travel agencies as a business sector, at worst riddled with cheats or at best inept and incapable of moving their business into cyberspace.
IATA rightly says there is nothing wrong with e-tickets. What is amiss is a lack of customer awareness of the codes that are included in the process.
Cheats play on this. They pass on to us the code referred to as a Passenger Name Record or simply a PNR, which logs the details of the passenger and the requested flights in the airline's database. The trick is to convince the passenger that the PNR code is what they need to present at the airline check-in counter.
Cash is usually exchanged for a print-out of the PNR and the passenger is not going to discover the error until they attempt to check-in at the airport.
In fact, we need to have two codes - the PNR and itinerary receipt. The latter clearly states that payment has been made and a seat is confirmed.
IATA executives are aware of this problem and advise passengers to ensure that they always leave a travel agency with the itinerary receipt, not a PNR.
A valid itinerary receipt has a 13 digits or characters in the code. Agents caught cheating invariably used a six-character code.
Also the print-out should show the airline's reference number and the fare calculation. If these items are missing the documents is invalid.
IATA does not have a budget to educate travellers about the differences in codes. However, there have been plenty of complaints filed with the Office of the Consumer Protection Board to warrant a campaign to alert people about the traps in e-ticketing.
Most travellers have booked airline tickets directly on web sites and recognise that they receive a booking confirmation followed within seconds by a confirmation that the credit card payment has been approved. A receipt with the code is then emailed to the traveller.
But we also tend to take e-ticketing for granted turning up at the check-in counter with the PNR number and forgetting to take along the print out of the itinerary receipt. We dealt directly with the airline so there is no hassle. Airline staff can view all the details on the computer screen.
When we decide to use a travel agency we need to know if it is a sub-agent or a full-fledged travel agency with IATA accreditation and therefore access to airline databases through a global distribution system such as Galileo, Abacus or Amadeus.
Research shows that cheating usually occurs with a sub-agent, who has no direct link to the airline distribution channels.
In some instances the sub agent will obtain the PNR code by requesting seats through an accredited agency. He then takes your money, but forgets to pass it on to wholesaler or accredited agency to complete the process.
Without the passenger knowledge the wholesaler will cancel the PNR when the payment deadline passes.
The wholesaler probably deals with hundreds of cancellations a day and will think nothing of it. We go to the airport and discover there is no record in the airline's database.
Some dubious agents will resort to another tactic. They enter an airline Internet site, book the passenger a flight and offer to use their own credit card knowing that it will not be approved. They print out the PNR and take the passenger's cash in return. Unknown to the passenger the laptop screen pops up with the web site message - "credit card payment failed". Booking washed out, but cash in the pocket.
Usually the victims are travellers who will not return to Bangkok, but in the publicised case, earlier this month, apparently a greedy travel agent attempted to accomplish a similar feat with a group of influential Thai government servants, who immediately reported the alleged fraud to the police and Consumer Protection Board.
The advice from airlines is simple enough - do business only with accredited and reliable travel agents. Unfortunately in the next breath, the same airlines admit they rely on a network of thousands of sub-agents to sell tickets knowing that some of them are prepared to take gullible customers to the cleaners. Travel agency accreditation needs a serious review.
Don Ross can be reached through this email address: info@ttreport.com.
