Now that electronic ticketing has reached critical mass with individual carriers, several technology vendors are focusing on making cross-carrier exchanges and refunds a reality.

The International Air Transport Association and IBM announced that they're developing a new service to link the e-ticket systems of hundreds of carriers around the world. The service is expected to become available by mid-2000. Separately, Worldspan and Amadeus announced that they're rolling out enhancements capable of processing e-ticketing exchanges and refunds, while Galileo said it is working on the programming to do so.

The new IATA-IBM solution will allow participating carriers to link to a central e-ticket service to process and exchange e-tickets. Although the top 30 airlines already have e-ticketing systems, other IATA member carriers might opt also to use this new service as a host system to create, store and process their e-tickets. Even so, several carriers are moving forward with e-ticket interlining, including Continental/America West and members of the Star Alliance. American and Canadian in June were the first pair to develop such compatibility. The new service will be branded by IATA, which will set pricing for carriers.

Worldspan and Amadeus separately announced last month that they began allowing U.S. subscribers to do automated e-ticket exchanges, refunds and refund/exchange authorization on Northwest, TWA and United airlines. The new services are expected to significantly reduce agent keystrokes and processing time, as well as pave at least part of the road necessary for participating carriers to deploy e-ticketing worldwide.

In allowing e-ticket exchanges and refunds, both GDSs now can support non-U.S. points of sale for its participating carriers, thus easing the further expansion of e-ticketing. Currently, e-ticketing accounts for more than 40 percent of all U.S. airline tickets issued through Worldspan.

As part of its enhancements, both GDSs introduced a standard format e-ticket history display, so agents won't have to learn separate carrier codes.

Amadeus' electronic refund and exchange facilities are available to international users. Galileo, meanwhile, said it continues to work on programming to allow it to extend the e-ticket exchange features already available to subscribers outside the United States. Subscribers told Galileo that service fees were a bigger priority.

~Mary Ann McNulty