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Lost Our Minds Over Lost Tickets
The Travel Troubleshooter · November 28, 2001

Q: My husband and I recently flew from Spokane to Honolulu. We were issued paper tickets for the round trip, which we booked directly through Alaska Airlines. Part of our itinerary, however, was on Northwest Airlines.

Four days prior to our return home we discovered that we couldn't find the return trip tickets. We tore our hotel room apart and contacted the lost-and-found department in our hotel and the Honolulu airport, but to no avail.

Northwest said if we'd booked through them, we would have had to pay $100 per ticket for a reprint, but we could pick them up at the Honolulu airport and we'd be done. Alaska couldn't or wouldn't replace our tickets and told us we'd have to repurchase our return trip tickets and submit a lost ticket form to receive a refund. Northwest told us that it would cost $748 per person to repurchase the tickets.

Each time we called either airline, we were told that they could see our reservation in their system, complete with assigned seats, but that without the piece of paper, we couldn't board. Granted, we lost the tickets and expected to pay a reasonable penalty, but we feel as though we were unduly punished for our oversight.

Is this common practice for airlines? What could have we done differently in the future besides stapling the return trip tickets to our foreheads?

-- Angela Lalonde

A: There's no need to staple a ticket to your forehead (ouch!). You could have avoided this by asking for an electronic ticket. An e-ticket means that you don't have to worry about paperwork, because an airline essentially "keeps" the ticket in its computer system.

If you made your reservation shortly after September 11, then Alaska Airlines may have strongly encouraged you to carry a paper ticket. That's because in some airports, passengers wouldn't be allowed through the security checkpoint without a valid paper ticket. However, many airports have eased up on that that requirement, and traveling with an electronic itinerary is now usually acceptable.

I'm surprised by what happened to you. Alaska Airlines is among the most forward-thinking airlines in the business, with an award-winning website and a critically acclaimed "Instant Travel" ticketless program. But I spent the better part of an entire morning on its website trying to research its policy on lost tickets and turned up absolutely nothing. If Alaska does have a policy on lost tickets (and I'm sure it does) then it isn't being upfront about it.

I'm not surprised by what happened at Northwest. I won't go into needless details, but suffice it to say that the carrier doesn't enjoy the same sterling reputation for innovation, technological or otherwise. I'm impressed that Northwest went through the trouble of posting its entire contract of carriage on its website (those are the terms and conditions of your ticket) but the document is almost entirely inaccessible. It downloads as an Adobe .PDF and is difficult to read.

All that is a roundabout way of saying that after extensive research, I find that neither of the airlines is eager to disclose its lost-ticket policy. I could call both airlines to find out what it is, but that would miss the point. Your trip is over and you don't have an argument with the lost-ticket policies; you want to know how to avoid this in the future.

Other than insisting on an e-ticket, you could have used a travel agent to book your trip. An agent may have still given you paper tickets, but if you had lost them, then they can help you salvage the rest of your itinerary. Agents are extremely well connected and can call on airline representatives that you don't have access to for special favors. Chances are you wouldn't have had to pay for an expensive return flight if you'd had an agent as an advocate.

Christopher Elliott is a travel commentator based in Key Largo, Fla. All e-mailed questions may be edited, condensed or republished at the site's discretion. ChrisCrossings appears weekly on this site.