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February, 26 2007
00:00
Finally, the Ministry of Justice of Russia has approved a decree “On the introduction of an electronic form of an airline ticket and baggage receipt in civil aviation” issued October 8, 2006 by Mr. Igor Levitin, the Minister of Transport of the Russian Federation. The order defines the form of an e-ticket and the procedure of its legitimate registration as a passenger ticket and a baggage receipt.
From this moment on e-tickets in Russia will circulate legitimately.
The story began from here: the International Air Transport Association (IATA) suggested that from January 01, 2008 all of its members should introduce electronic tickets and stop issuing paper tickets. According to IATA, the cancellation of paper tickets will let air companies worldwide save as much as $3 billion on paper and printing as long as the cost of issuing an e-ticket is $1 while a paper ticket costs $10. Not mentioning the fact that the procedure of buying air tickets would become quicker and simpler.
Vladivostok Air became a full member of IATA on April 23, 2004. Since then the company’s staff have been working to introduce the system of electronic ticket sales. As a result, the company has signed contracts for electronic registration of its passengers at the airports of China, Japan, the South Korea, provided for the registration of e-tickets in Moscow, Ekaterinburg, Irkutsk, Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk, and other cities, and signed electronic interlines with Korean Air and Continental Airlines.
A so-called “interline” is an agreement between air companies to mutually accept transportation documents. That means that the passenger who has bought an air ticket from one air company, can fly with any other company that is a member of the interline agreement. At present Vladivostok Air has more than 60 interline partners for paper tickets, and already two partners for e-tickets. The company continues to follow this line of development. There is a task to sign e-ticket interline agreements with all leading air companies worldwide as soon as possible which will let the company sell e-tickets for partner flights.
On May 05, 2006 the company's passenger flied with a test e-ticket from Vladivostok to Seoul for the first time.
But until now Vladivostok Air and other Russian air companies as well could not introduce the e-ticket system in full because of the limitations imposed by Russian legislation. According to Russia’s laws, only a paper ticket could be accepted as the document to confirm the agreement between a passenger and an air company, as well as a legitimate fiscal document, while an e-ticket did not really exist, with a printed boarding pass being its only material form.
Owing to the acceptance of the decree mentioned above, the problem has been partially solved. Now an air company will choose for itself either to issue a route receipt or to register its paper receipts (paper again!) at the Ministry of Finance as reporting documents adding information about each passenger, a flight number, and a ticket cost.
— This system, — Mr. Andrey Spitsyn, the head of Vladivostok Air sales department, comments, — is acceptable for Russia, but unfortunately there are still many airports in the country that are not equipped to register e-tickets. One might say “Well, it’s no e-ticket at all! It’s a paper one anyway!” But it must be understood that all this system is just a temporary means to introduce an e-ticket as it is, because tax offices themselves are not ready to accept reports from air companies in electronic format. And there is no legal basis for this procedure.
At the same time, an e-ticket is preferable for passengers compared to a paper one. It’s much easier to buy it: first, it takes less time to issue an e-ticket, second, if an air company provides such a service, a passenger can just buy through a website — choose the dates, pay with his credit card and print a boarding pass by himself. That’s it. A passenger doesn’t have to go anywhere and doesn’t care about the working time of a ticket office. With e-tickets, there will be no problems of tickets lost — in the nearest future a passenger will only have to show his identification document.
To make those who book and purchase tickets “virtually” feel comfortable, Vladivostok Air plans to mount an electronic kiosk for self-registration and a special baggage check where a passenger will not have to wait in a line at all.
According to the world statistics, the introduction of e-tickers increases a company’s profit by 2%, mainly through the increase in direct sales. By the way, e-tickets are not good for everybody — ticket agencies have reasons to fear that electronic sales will bring their turnover down. But it depends on how the procedure is organized. In the United States air companies sell tickets to agencies with considerable discounts, and the agencies that sell e-tickets through their own websites. Again, the client gain benefit: he gets information about many air companies from one website and can choose the most comfortable or the cheapest variant depending on his personal needs. At the same time, the results of a poll of US citizens show, for example, that 76% of clients prefer personal communication with an agent, especially when flying complex routes.
Nevertheless, all passengers are becoming more and more interested in e-tickets. Having purchased an e-ticket once, the passengers, as a rule, would stick to it. For example, 20% of passengers flying from Moscow are already actively using the e-ticket system.
Summing up, the situation is favorable for e-ticket sales as long as both air companies and their passengers benefit from using e-tickets. Now the only limitation that had existed – that is, the legal one – was eliminated. There are reasons to hope that the present paper tickets, including Vladivostok Air’s ones, will become a rarity in 2008.
