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> When you buy a flight or a journey, you are actually buying a ticket. This used to be a paper ticket, but now it's electronic. But the actual process is the s

> When you buy a flight or a journey, you are actually buying a ticket. This used to be a paper ticket, but now it's electronic. But the actual process is the same as before, it's just an electronic implementation of the paper. The ticket is your proof to the airline that you paid an organisation it trusts for the flight. The airline will only distribute its unique ticket paper to travel agents it trusts. Back a very long time ago, I worked for a company that had a lot of traveling employees. We were our own travel agent and had on-site all of the things a retail travel agent (at the time) had. As a junior sysadmin, I was responsible for the computer parts, specifically getting the ticket printing machine placed in a secure room--TWO keys and a reinforced door and door frame--and working with our telco vendor to get the dedicated circuit connected to the nearest Sabre Global Distribution System hub. One day, the ticket printing machine experienced a fault and ran a whole stack of ticket paper through at high speed, shredding all of the blank ticket stock we had. Though it didn't look like it at the time, this wound up being an absolute nightmare. We could only get a certain amount of ticket stock at a time (since there were few digital controls, if I took a blank ticket and typed my own details onto it, free flight!...until someone matched up the audit number). We couldn't just ring up our sponsoring corporate travel agency and ask for more ticket stock because they had the same limitations on themselves. I spent all weekend picking all of the pieces out of the machine and taping them back together to get the audit numbers off of enough (I think 90%) of the destroyed ticket stock, along with pictures of the shredded pile and of the inside of and nearby the machine. The pictures were developed at a K-Mart and the whole works sent off via FedEx first-AM overnight (the most expensive parcel I'd ever shipped, $135 at the time) to an address somewhere in Colorado. Three hours after delivery, I had a phone call saying our request for replacement ticket stock was granted and they sent a stack of ticket stock via hand-delivered courier who I had to meet at the nearby airport. Fortunately we didn't need to issue any tickets for our employees to travel that weekend.

dstick 5y ago
Yeah I can see why this workflow went digital the second it was possible :D Thanks for sharing!
jiveturkey 5y ago
> hand-delivered courier who I had to meet at the nearby airport. where they presumably were able to fly gratis, since they own the ticket stock! lol
ramses0 5y ago
Thieves used to break into (relatively unsecured) travel agencies, steal the blank paper tickets, and resell them at astronomical markup, with the agency "on the hook" for paying the maximum value of the tickets stolen. Basically, "ticket paper" was like a blank check which you could fill in with a pencil saying "$10,000: first class ticket from NYC to LON", and the airline would accept that ticket, and reconcile it _back_ to the original issuing agent (who didn't issue the ticket, but instead had it stolen). Once "the paper" was out there, it was prohibitively expensive to maintain and distribute a "rejection database" of serial numbers at all points-of-boarding, so tickets were accepted "at face value" rather than denying boarding. As the world has become more connected and digitized, yes, airline use cases have always been one of the first to take advantage of integrating commerce and technology. SABRE is one of the oldest technology companies, and probably one of the oldest, most important "continual use" databases around. https://www.ibm.com/ibm/history/ibm100/us/en/icons/sabre/ https://www.ibm.com/ibm/history/ibm100/us/en/icons/sabre/ ...great history in that article! > The thieves are well organized, stealing thousands of blank tickets at a time, forging them and typically reselling them for $200 to $10,000 apiece, authorities said. > “The airlines, in my humble opinion, could stop this,” said a Westlake Village travel agent who was recently held at gunpoint and tied up while thieves ransacked his business. Officials with the American Society of Travel Agents, which represents more than 11,000 agencies nationally, agree. ~1978: https://www.ojp.gov/ncjrs/virtual-library/abstracts/airline-passenger-tickets-theft-and-fraudulent-use https://www.ojp.gov/ncjrs/virtual-library/abstracts/airline-... ~1999: https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1999-aug-22-me-2752-story.html https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1999-aug-22-me-2752-...
- techsupporter 5y ago
  > Thieves used to break into (relatively unsecured) travel agencies, steal the blank paper tickets, and resell them at astronomical markup, with the agency "on the hook" for paying the maximum value of the tickets stolen. As I recall, the room security for the ticket printer was a requirement of our sponsoring travel agency and our insurance company. I had to meet with a representative of our insurance company, a person from The Hartford who was dressed identically to an IBM salesperson of old, for them to inspect the arrangements. According to my boss, who was in the meetings to get set up, we were just barely a big enough company that our owner (the company was private at the time) didn't have to sign a personal guarantee for something like $3 million worth of potential ticket losses. Of course, us eggheads in the IT department didn't fully know any of this until the stupid printer blew up. Oh and thank you for the links. I did kind of wonder where those incredibly cheap but shady looking travel deals in the classifieds came from...

dstick 5y ago

Yeah I can see why this workflow went digital the second it was possible :D Thanks for sharing!

jiveturkey 5y ago

> hand-delivered courier who I had to meet at the nearby airport. where they presumably were able to fly gratis, since they own the ticket stock! lol

ramses0 5y ago

Thieves used to break into (relatively unsecured) travel agencies, steal the blank paper tickets, and resell them at astronomical markup, with the agency "on the hook" for paying the maximum value of the tickets stolen. Basically, "ticket paper" was like a blank check which you could fill in with a pencil saying "$10,000: first class ticket from NYC to LON", and the airline would accept that ticket, and reconcile it _back_ to the original issuing agent (who didn't issue the ticket, but instead had it stolen). Once "the paper" was out there, it was prohibitively expensive to maintain and distribute a "rejection database" of serial numbers at all points-of-boarding, so tickets were accepted "at face value" rather than denying boarding. As the world has become more connected and digitized, yes, airline use cases have always been one of the first to take advantage of integrating commerce and technology. SABRE is one of the oldest technology companies, and probably one of the oldest, most important "continual use" databases around. https://www.ibm.com/ibm/history/ibm100/us/en/icons/sabre/ https://www.ibm.com/ibm/history/ibm100/us/en/icons/sabre/ ...great history in that article! > The thieves are well organized, stealing thousands of blank tickets at a time, forging them and typically reselling them for $200 to $10,000 apiece, authorities said. > “The airlines, in my humble opinion, could stop this,” said a Westlake Village travel agent who was recently held at gunpoint and tied up while thieves ransacked his business. Officials with the American Society of Travel Agents, which represents more than 11,000 agencies nationally, agree. ~1978: https://www.ojp.gov/ncjrs/virtual-library/abstracts/airline-passenger-tickets-theft-and-fraudulent-use https://www.ojp.gov/ncjrs/virtual-library/abstracts/airline-... ~1999: https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1999-aug-22-me-2752-story.html https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1999-aug-22-me-2752-...

techsupporter 5y ago
> Thieves used to break into (relatively unsecured) travel agencies, steal the blank paper tickets, and resell them at astronomical markup, with the agency "on the hook" for paying the maximum value of the tickets stolen. As I recall, the room security for the ticket printer was a requirement of our sponsoring travel agency and our insurance company. I had to meet with a representative of our insurance company, a person from The Hartford who was dressed identically to an IBM salesperson of old, for them to inspect the arrangements. According to my boss, who was in the meetings to get set up, we were just barely a big enough company that our owner (the company was private at the time) didn't have to sign a personal guarantee for something like $3 million worth of potential ticket losses. Of course, us eggheads in the IT department didn't fully know any of this until the stupid printer blew up. Oh and thank you for the links. I did kind of wonder where those incredibly cheap but shady looking travel deals in the classifieds came from...