[steve w]

If you have a paper ticket to travel by air, you may want to hold on to it – paper tickets may well become a collector’s item. IATA recently announced that all the major airlines will stop issuing paper tickets, effective next summer. Most airlines are already almost entirely electronic – American for example, now estimates that around 98% of its tickets are "e-tickets".

Electronic ticketing is much less expensive for an airline – on average, an electronic ticket costs less than $1 to generate, as opposed to between $10 to $17 for each paper ticket printed. In addition to being less expensive, electronic tickets also make it easier and quicker for the airlines to measure revenue and balance the books. In the past, entire bundles of paper tickets had to be packaged, counted and sent to a processing facility where the data was collected.

Most passengers prefer e-tickets as well – they don’t have to worry about losing their ticket. If you have a paper ticket, airlines generally charge you a fee to replace it or even make you buy a completely new replacement ticket. If you lose the copy of your faxed or e-mailed electronic ticket, the airline will replace it for you – although as the airlines now charge for just about everything, there may be a small charge for that.