The travel agency in which I am employed holds contracts for several large government accounts. I work as the Government Client Services Representative for our government department and I see the daily frustration that our employees experience in having to call in ticket transactions on ticketless carriers. For our government accounts we have approximately 10 employees that are members of our government support team. These employees work daily behind the scenes helping travel agents and managers with queue rolls, schedule change queues, preparing records for ticketing and then finally ticketing. We have one support team member in particular whose responsibility is to ensure that all tickets have been issued with carriers such as Airtran, Jetblue, and Southwest airlines that do not utilize the E-ticket feature within the GDS system. This employee spends the entire day on the telephone calling in payment for these airlines ticketless transactions since these carriers are not on the E-ticket system. It seems that there should be some type of mandatory requirement in place for airline vendors of considerable size to be on the E-ticket system. It is a complete waste of time to have to sit on the phone for so many tickets to be purchased. Southwest in particular only allows for 20 tickets to be purchased within one call. Therefore, the support team member simply calls back once the current call has been completed. While the minimum ticket transactions per call is certainly understandable in that there are other callers that the airline must serve in a timely manner I believe that this seemingly simple step would save a great deal of time for all travel agencies as well as the airline, plus there is the fact that these airlines could also increase their revenue by charging fees for E-ticket transactions which are much more quicker and effective. Also, another important point is that after reservations are called in to the airline this same support agent receives the faxed confirmation of ticket from the airline. This in turn requires more time on each ticket as the support team member must sort through each confirmation received, forward to the proper agent and also take additional steps to manually invoice for the ticket which is automatically done on the E-ticketing system.
By Michelle P. Kennard