Booking Flights Then and Now: My Journey Through Decades of Airline Change – Brian Kane

Gone are the days when you were asked to manually arrange an airline ticket for just a short hop down to London, or further afield into Europe or the rest of the world.

The first step of the painstaking process was to locate the OAG airline bible, which listed all flight routes worldwide, to check if you could fly direct or if a change en route was needed. This guide was 2–3 inches thick! Once you had your route and knew the operating airline, it was on the phone to check for seats. There were no online systems then – or if there were, they weren’t up to much – so it was best trusting the person on the other end of the line. If seats were available, the airline would make the reservation and, if you were lucky, talk you through the fare rules and taxes to be applied. If not, it was time to search for the fares manual and work all this out yourself.

So, we now had secured a reservation, a ticket price, tax information, and the fare rules. Time for the fun part: issuing the passenger ticket. You would be off to the office safe to locate the paper airline ticket stock where you had to select whether you needed a 2-coupon or 4-coupon ticket – or, if you were really unlucky, conjunction tickets. If your journey had more than four sectors, then two tickets were stapled together. Complicated stuff!

With the ticket stock in hand, the next step was to find the airline issuing CIP plate (the size of a credit card), followed by the airline validator, just like an old manual credit card machine, to validate the ticket with the date and airline data. Then it was time to find a pen and manually write the ticket, hoping you didn’t make a mistake. If you did, you had to void the ticket and start all over again.

Once you had your neatly written ticket, it was off to find the airline stock book to update and list that this ticket number had been issued and used. Yes, there was fraud back then too, so travel agents holding airline ticket stock had to follow tight controls. Finally, you contacted the passenger to call in to collect their ticket, and off they went.

Really, I’ve no idea how we all managed back then with every process being manual, but we did. Over time, technology started to make massive steps which transformed the airline industry.

As the airlines developed their own technology, this eventually filtered down to travel agencies with Global Distribution Systems (GDS) like Sabre, Apollo, Galileo, and Worldspan. These were adopted by many agencies, allowing direct access to airline availability, the ability to book, manage reservations, and issue tickets themselves without any phone calls or manual booking requests. The tickets were still paper, but they now came out of a machine instead of being handwritten – a much clearer, more secure process with benefits for all.

Then, with the arrival of low-cost airlines like EasyJet, Go, and Ryanair in the late ’90s, the next major change hit the airline world. The low-cost model was simple: you buy your seat, and everything else was extra. Allocated seats, cabin and hold baggage, food, advance boarding, extra legroom were all add-ons. Legacy airlines had to catch up quickly, and today most of them follow the same model. Unlike before, when everything was included in the ticket cost, back then you didn’t need to worry – you got a seat number, baggage allowance, and a meal. All of those are now a thing of the past unless you pay. These charges are even creeping into business class. You can be paying thousands of pounds for your ticket, but if you want lounge access or to know your specific seat number, that’s an extra charge on top!

We still all use the same GDS systems like Sabre, Travelport, and Amadeus, but from the late ’90s into the early 2000s, electronic tickets were launched. By 2007, every airline offered them. No more paper tickets, everything went digital. Tickets could be downloaded or emailed to passengers, providing greater security and flexibility while giving travel agents full control of their reservations. This enabled seamless changes and amendments to tickets in-house, with no airline contact needed. This freed up so much time for agents and allowed us to increase the amount of bookings we could make.

Who knows what major changes will arrive in the next 5–10 years? What I do know is that the travel agent community will embrace and adapt, as we’ve always done, working alongside the airline industry. Hopefully, I’ll be lucky enough to be retired by then – haha!