For most of us, buying an airline ticket is still a matter of making a phone call, reciting credit card numbers and waiting for mail carriers to deliver our tickets, or perhaps driving to an airline office to pick them up ourselves. But a handful of companies are now vying to give air travelers a shortcut - via a network of remote airline ticketing machines.
The first of these travelers are still buying their tickets by calling and booking through a travel agent or an airline. But once the tickets are ordered, instead of waiting for the mail or fighting traffic to reach an airline's branch office, the consumers make their way to a more convenient retail site, hotel or airport and pick up their ticket from an attendant operating a machine similar to an automated teller.For now, most of the 200 or so ticketing sites are scattered around the West in airports, hotels and commercial centers, and fewer than one in six U.S. travel agencies (depending on the computerized reservation systems they use) is capable of delivering tickets this way. But two companies are serving the public with attended machines, and Tom Mistrot, manager of electronic ticket delivery networks for Airlines Reporting Corp., predicts that networks like these "will ultimately be a primary, if not the primary, way of delivering tickets."
Among those who could benefit most from the innovation: travelers who fly on short notice and make frequent ticketing changes; travelers who use out-of-town or across-town travel agents and travelers who book flights with airlines via home computer.
Both Mail Boxes Etc. and QDAT Corp. of Scottsdale, Ariz., have been accredited to sell tickets via electronic networks by the Airlines Reporting Corp., which represents more than 140 airlines in the printing and distribution of tickets. Officials of Airlines Reporting Corp. say three other firms have been accredited but are not yet selling tickets: Travel Teller International of Dublin, Ohio; Electronic Data Systems of Dallas and Sabre, the Dallas-based computer reservation system owned by the parent company of American Airlines.
Mail Boxes Etc. and QDAT make their money by signing up airlines and travel agents and charging them annual fees and transaction fees (Mail Boxes Etc. charges $7 for a booking; QDAT, $8.95.)
QDAT, which says it has signed on several hundred travel agencies nationwide, so far has been concentrating on putting ticketing sites in airports and hotels, while Mail Boxes Etc. is sticking to its own franchised outlets in retail shopping areas. (The stores, roughly 2,400 nationwide, specialize in handling package mail, faxes and other communications.)
Generally, the ticketing sites are placed near airport fax and copy machines and other business services.
QDAT has placed another roughly 100 ticket machines in upscale, business-oriented U.S. hotels. For now, each airport and hotel printer is overseen by someone trained in its operation (either an attendant or a hotel employee), though Danoff foresees the arrival of unattended ticketing machines this fall in some major office buildings.
To get their tickets, travelers right now must book their flight by phone with an airline or a travel agent who pays a sign-up fee to QDAT or Mail Boxes Etc. and uses the computerized reservation system known as System One. System One, used by about 16 percent of the roughly 32,000 computerized travel agencies in the United States, includes all major airlines except Southwest (which is embroiled in a dispute with computer reservation system operators over fees).