Since the beginning of November, Shenzhen Airlines, Travel Sky Technology Limited and CAAC Settlement Center have been trying using the electronic tickets on the flights from Shenzhen to Beijing, to Haikou and Guilin and almost 1000 passengers have been using it up to now. Not long afterwards, this will be put into practices on all flights departing from Shenzhen.

The electronic ticket, as introduced, is a kind of seat-booking system in which is deposited the face information of a passenger ticket. It's not "no-ticket" but "no paper-ticket". Such operations as issuance, cancellation and refund of a ticket can be conducted in the electronic ticketing system and a salesperson can screen such information as issuance, checking up his/her name, flight section and price of a passenger ticket at any time when necessary.

As informed, the tickets are all subject to the flow of electronic settlement, which can be done without any duplicated sheets as required by paper-tickets. Passenger can buy or re-schedule a ticket at the airline ticketing office or by getting onto its website. Only by showing the identity card, airport staff can get the face information based on the passenger's name and flight number and after verifying the card the boarding card can be printed, with which the passenger concerned is permitted to pass the safety check for boarding a plane.

According to the professionals, for a passenger, the electronic ticket has overcome the shortcoming of being easily lost or damaged. The dial-booking and website purchasing of a ticket has reduced much intermediary handling, thus making the buying of a ticket quicker and more convenient while the group ticketing is even more so, thereby raising greatly the working efficiency. And for airlines, the promotion of electronic ticket has helped save a lot of manpower and materials. With each ticket to save around RMB 30 yuan the whole CAAC complex will be able save a cost of nearly RMB 300 million-yuan if one seventh of the passenger tickets are using the electronic ones instead. The CAAC will try introducing the use of electronic tickets in three newly-added airlines for flights on the 50 air-routes by the year 2002.

(People's Daily December 4, 2001)