Plane Tickets: Paper Or E-tickets?
E-tickets have become commonplace. If you book an airline ticket online, they are the norm. Even airline and travel agents will normally ask if you prefer an e-ticket or a paper ticket. There are good and not so food aspects to both of them. If you are a traveler who likes to have everything spelled out for you, such as luggage restrictions, how to handle lost baggage claims and that sort of thing, then you might want to stick with a paper ticket. Be aware that if you book your flight online, many places will charge you a fee to provide you with a paper ticket. If you’re traveling overseas, you might also want to consider a paper ticket for your entire flight. Some international flights do not offer e-tickets, and that can lead to confusion in booking your luggage all the way through to your destination if part of your ticket is a paper ticket and part of it is an e-ticket. You can sometimes run into problems with an e-ticket if you suddenly need to change airlines, say because of a strike or an airline closing down. Other airlines may not honor your reservation until your tickets are reissued as paper tickets. So now you might be wondering exactly why you would want an e-ticket in the first place. Well for one thing, it’s a whole lot easier to keep up with. It’s faster in many instances. Once you make your reservation and you’re issued a confirmation number, you’re done. You don’t have to pick up tickets at the gate and you don’t have to wait for paper tickets to be sent to you in the mail. Very often you can use e-ticket kiosks at airports to even print out your boarding pass! Just make sure you bring along the credit card you used to purchase the ticket. There are several things you can do to make using e-tickets run as smoothly as possible: • Print a copy of your confirmation number. Don’t just