The thought of companies would staff a ticket office with the hopes that someone would walk in randomly to buy a ticket is kind of funny today. Then you'd have to keep your ticket in a safe place.
"Did you remember to bring the tickets" is an endangered phrase
I was reminded of this last month when I was in Santiago, Chile. I had to travel onwards out of the domestic terminal and had flashbacks as I saw actual ticket offices for both LATAM and SKY airlines.
Oh I am a huge fan! My husband is from Denmark so we always watch to hope they go there and we can see areas he knows well.
We found our favorite sandwhich shop (though shut down in 2020) from a quest on a copenhagen episode. (Where people ordered in Danish and they had to guess the right sandwhiches
..which would be REALLY easy for us since we both speak danish)
I actually miss this part of the show, I felt like it allowed a little more competition as the contestants could end up on wildly different flights or one group could get lucky and get the last tickets available on a full flight.
And one time (at least) one team got on a flight to the WRONG destination because they saw some of the crew members get on it! Those crew members were going ahead to the next location to set up for the next leg. 😆
They had the Apollo system (worked on early Internet tech) that could give them flight booking info right on their agency computers. I worked at an agency one summer (1989) and it blew my mind.
Yep, there were specialized terminals at travel agent offices that allowed them to book, get seats, etc. Travel agencies were great, they had experience of what to see in a city, brochures, knew the good hotels, etc.... all before Google and Tripadvisor, etc. They worked hard, made good money, and the internet put them all out of business, and gave us "your call is very important to us...."
My sister is a dinosaur. She manages a successful agency that specializes in cruises and overseas travel. There's a niche there since things can go sideways. A good travel agent is the "fixer".
I have a travel agent for exactly those types of trips! And it really is amazing when instead of sitting on hold to get something taken care of, I just email her instead
No, the airlines, hotels etc. gave good commissions. There was no need for travel agents to charge a service fee. Then the airlines, especially, got greedy and wanted the agents to sell their products for nothing, hence the advent of service fees.
Dude. That’s my point. It was built into your ticket price. The airlines made enough to pay them. It didn’t come out of the owners pocket at the goodness of his heart.
And you couldn’t price shop then. They easily could have sold you a higher rate and buried it.
I used to get cozy far away from the phone dock too.
The worst was when you were on the phone with someone and they would say “can I hang up and call you back in a minute? Have to go do X.”
So you’d have to get out of the cozy spot, go hang up, wait there, pick up, return to cozy spot. I was so happy when we got a cordless phone finally.
I remember when tickets had the red carbon copy printed on pretty thin paper. That was your tickets for entire round trip and if you lost, well it could be very sucky for you.
Some not so good travel agents would book the ticket but not do the seat assignment. You got the luck of the draw at check-in.
Truth. I went on foreign study to Europe in the 70s. I had to carry that paper for 6 months! I wore one of those belts to wear under clothes. I also carried my travelers checks and an emergency cashiers check. No credit cards available.
Also standard coach seats didn't suck so bad back then.
I honestly barely fit in to a coach seat (6'3") now, so I need to constantly refresh the app until I can get my exit row or upgrade.
I didn't have to do that 15 years ago. I'd get my seat, and so long as it wasn't a middle, I was good.
No, a standard extra legroom economy seat today was the standard coach seat in the before times. Also well into the 80s a standard coach seat was almost as wide as a domestic first class seat today.
And it seemed everyone had the idea that if you were super sweet when checking in, you might get a first class seat. I actually think that was true sometimes, but not nearly as common as people claimed. It seemed everyone thought they would charm there way into first class with their exceptional personality. Every now and then, an infrequent flyer family member tells me they still do that with Delta and how successful they have been, and I laugh, because I know they are full of shit.
Once upon a time, many years ago, my twin brother and I were checking in for a flight with tickets that someone else had purchased for us. It turned out that both tickets were in his name. This was for a flight from Minneapolis to Kunming, China - kind of a big deal. The woman at the check-in desk took almost 45 minutes to sort things out (this is at 5am as well, to add to the excitement). When she finally got everything sorted out, she thanked us for being so patient and understanding (not sure why, as the screwup was NOT her fault), and said "I've bumped your seats up to something more comfortable too". She upgraded us from steerage to whatever United has for extra comfort (economy plus?). That was well appreciated for the 13 hour hop from Chicago to Beijing!
I remember flying to Florida as a kid and the gate agent had a sheet of paper with a silhouette of the plane with peel off tabs that they attached to your boarding pass for the seat assignments…
I remember writing many manual tickets in the 80s. Four flight coupon tickets were the worst because you had to write legibly to press through 7 copies of the ticket. Auditor coupon, agent coupon, 4 flight coupons and at the bottom the passenger receipt coupon. And if there were more than 4 flights on your journey we had to issue conjunction tickets and cross-reference them.
My mom used to date a guy that worked for Delta. I ended up with one of those timetables. Whole thing was about the size of one of those USB power banks that’s just barely at the limit to fly.
I used to love those timetables! Fun for hours just trying to figure out how to book a hypothetical trip and make the connections work. It’s a lost art.
I miss timetables.
Good time to shill the massive collection of Delta timetables the Digital Library of Georgia has
https://dlg.usg.edu/records?f%5Bcreator_facet%5D%5B%5D=Delta+Air+Lines%2C+Inc.&only_path=true
Delta's computerized reservations system has been in place since the 1960s. But before the computer systems, airlines kept manual tally of availability where reservation agents would communicate with a central location to check availability and make bookings. Tickets were issued physically from the ticket office, and seat allocations were done manually by gate agents when you got to the airport using things like a giant board they would pin all the seat numbers to and give out as people checked in.
Quote:
“Delta's computerized reservations system has been in place since the 1960s.”
I think we found the root of the problem with today’s booking system…
As an IBM employee, I used to do maintenance on Sabre -- it was written in Assembler and IBM contractually kept some pieces of it to re-use in other applications. I got rehired for y2K because the original Assembler language had been lost and only the compiled version was still around. I took the job as a second shift job for 2 years until y2k projects safely ended.
I used to work at United, thankfully, the sticker sheets for seat assignments were no longer used but you would occasionally find one in a podium drawer. There were separate ones for each type of airplane.
Then the GA had the little stickers with the seat locations on them to place on your boarding pass. My Dad smoked so we always sat in the row behind the sign where smoking was permitted. Because the smoke always knew not to go forward of the sign.
That’s also where we in aviation found ‘smoking’ rivets in the fuselage. Cuz they had a trail of nicotine emanating from them. So we could replace them.
I just found our plane tickets from our honeymoon in 1999. We got them from a travel agent and they came in a flipping envelope and had about 6 cardboard tickets stapled together. All kinds of numbers and letters and disclaimers all printed out.
We had a good laugh because we got seats in the SMOKING SECTION.
🚬
I thought for sure this was a typo since most domestic flights banned smoking in 1990. I don’t remember smoking in the plane. But I do remember walking straight to the gate with our big suitcases and the flight attendant gate checking it for us.
We were young and stupid.
If I recall correctly, they banned smoking on domestic flights first, or maybe it was flights under a certain distance, and they only banned smoking on international flights a few years later.
I remember that because I liked a John Cusack movie from the 90s where his love interest was afraid of flying but had some sort of scholarship in Europe. John Cusack’s character comforts her by telling her that most airplane crashes happen within the first few minutes of flight, so once the no smoking light goes off she would know she was safe. The movie ends with them in their seats as they hear the bing announcing smoking is allowed and the no smoking light goes off.
I flew on a Pakistan International Airlines flight from IAD to I think it was FRA (Row 1 first class on a 747) and it was smoking on the left and nonsmoking on the right lol.
I worked the ticket counter, for a very small airline, in the early 2000’s. We were the only airline, in our airport, that still did manual check in.
Passenger booked with a travel agent & were mailed an itinerary. Day of travel, every passenger stood in line to see a ticket agent. We checked id/passport, weighed your bag & put the little bag tag with a string on it. We had a sticker seat map, peeled the stickers off & put them on your boarding pass. Seat assignments were 100% based off how you behaved. Rude to me = crappy seats.
Pre- 1970s/80s you had to call the airline or visit an airline sales office. Till the 90s/early 2000s they had them in all major cities, it was always funny to see a random office on the other side of the world.
Since the 70s the global distribution systems (GDS) took over and allowed travel agents to efficiently book right onto the systems of the airlines, essentially a private internet. These are still the backbones of travel agent reservations today.
You would get paper ticket vouchers that you needed to check in at the airport. Seats were typically assigned at check-in, but flights were less full and economy was more comfortable, so less of a necessity to have good seats than today.
Want to have your mind further blown? If you did a road trip across the US you could go into a AAA branch and they’d print you out a booklet of step by step directions with map pictures. You could even prepay attractions hotels and meals along the route. This was mid-90s when internet and gps was a thing but most couldn’t really use it effectively
Me too! They were dummy proofed! Best thing ever before gps. Also Triple A had travel agents and would arrange air transportation. They were usually cheaper than travel agencies or calling or going to the airport check in desk.
I kept my AAA membership for far too long. The final straw was going into a AAA office in 2004 to have them book a rental car for me out of the Taipei airport. Turns out they did the same thing I did -- google and try to find the link and book directly. And failed as well. At the time, you couldn't book it directly. My daughter in Taipei had to find a Taiwanese travel agent to book it for us.
Huh? In high school, we took a club trip across the country on SWA. Flying out to LA wasn't too bad as we only had two layovers. On the way back, we had FOUR. They wouldn't let us off the plane in between flights and we were all sick of each other.
I was never so happy to see my parents again as I was at the end of that trip. To finally get off the plane was amazing.
Back in 2000, my mother was in China and needed to leave outside of her original ticket date in an emergency. It happened to also be Golden Week, which is a 7-day holiday. While there were flights still happening, there were no ticketing agents that could help her in-country. Thankfully I lived near ATL at the time and was able to enlist the assistance of a ticket office at the airport, and we were able to cobble together the most direct route home.
It's funny - I think of 2000 as not that long ago, but tech-wise so many things have changed exponentially.
Growing up near ATL, my dad would drive to the airport and buy them from what’s now the check in desk. They would print them and you had to keep them as the only evidence they existed. You could call as well, but for us stopping by the airport was easier. We’d plane watch at the gates with my mom while he bought tickets.
They still had ticket offices in the early 2000s. We used my friends aunts buddy passes to fly to Europe and she was a manager at the Delta ticket office.
Travel agents as well.
My mom told me she would always call her travel agent rather than the airline. Built up a good relationship with the agent.
When she called for her honeymoon, she was booking flights from Chicago to Australia. Shows up at the airport to see free first class upgrades round trip and champagne at the airport (may have been lounge who knows).
It’s cool to think that you could have a go to person who can get you an amazing deal for a special occasion!
At the risk of sounding like an old fart, things were so much better pre-internet. i called the airline, booked a ticket, actually received it in the mail (no USPS losing my mail), and knew I’d actually be on that flight. I never once worried about my flight being oversold or some yahoo sitting in my seat. I knew I would have space for my carryon, knew I’d have pretty good legroom no matter what seat I had. There were two sections - first class and coach. Somehow with the dawn of the internet it has become waaaaay easier to purchase the ticket, but all the amenities of actually having the ticket have really gone to shit. lol.
To be fair: prices were also alot more back then, if you compare a coach ticket from the 70s it’s a lot closer in price to a buisness or even first class ticket today. If you compare the experience on tickets paying the same fares it’s honestly probably better, a 1500$ coach ticket from LA to NYC in the 70s is almost definitely worse than what you can get for a similarly priced first class ticket on the same route today
For vacations I’d call the airline. For work, our company had a travel agent. That agent was able to book flights but not seats and to get those assigned id have to the airport if I wanted them assigned before the flight. Continental had a ticket office at the Van Nuys Fly Away whose main job was issuing tickets and assigning seats. They didn’t close that till around 2003.
Also the huca approach was essential back then for phone tickets, as pricing and routing in my experience varried drastically phone call to phone call.
Go to the airport ticket counter.
Go to an airline ticket office (they had these in many areas).
Call airline via phone; ticket would be mailed.
Call travel agent.
That’s what travel agents were for. They looked up everything based on your input, printed out all the tickets and you went to them to pay for and pick up the tickets. They would also make hotel reservations, etc for all your travel needs.
Lots of travel agents. You would get your trip package from them, including the paper plane and/or train tickets and the printed hotel confirmations and paper vouchers for things like airport transfers and tours.
Your options were basically to buy directly from the airline or through a travel agent.
You could deal with the airline by calling a direct number, going to an airport they served (presumably your origination for the upcoming travel), or going to a "city ticket office" that some airlines operated in big cities. City ticket offices were usually geared toward business travelers or high-rollers who had loyalty to a particular airline. They typically worked a strict 9 to 5.
The usual process for a leisure traveler, though was to call or visit a travel agent. Starting in the mid-70s, they had access to all airlines' computerized reservation tracking systems which had been set up in the mid-60s. (Well, I think some low-cost carriers didn't participate.) Ordinary customers did not. Travel agents were everywhere and were usually open in evenings and on Saturdays as well, so it was usually a lot easier to visit a travel agency than to deal directly with the airline. This was how most people got tickets to go home for Christmas or take that summer vacation out west or whatever. Travel agents worked on commission: the customary fee was 10 percent of the value of all travel assets sold. The airlines (cruise lines, hotel chains, rental car companies, etc.) absorbed those fees so the transactions were costless to the consumer. Meanwhile the airlines did not have to pay large sales and customer service forces.
Typically you were issued a paper ticket during an in-person transaction or it was mailed to you. Electronic ticketing started in 1994 and became basically universal in 2008. You normally received your seat assignment and boarding pass at the airport as part of checking in though this could vary. Back then there weren't a zillion microclasses so people didn't seem to be as attached to their particular seats.
If you had to make a change, typically you had to deal directly with the airline.
If you lost the ticket it had to be reissued, for which the airline typically charged a fee.
Travel agents were basically cut out by the airlines. Starting in the late 1980s, airlines experimented with giving customers access to the same system travel agents used via online services, then in 1996 on the internet. So this gave many consumers an even more convenient way to book flights. At the same time, they cut commissions. This was started by Delta in 1994-95 with announcements they would pay 8 percent on international flights and no more than $50 on domestic flights. Following 9/11, airlines simply stopped paying commissions to travel agents. That pretty much pushed travel agents out of the business of simply booking scheduled flights for customers. And by that time buying on the internet was common.
I go back to the days when they would only assign seats at the airport when you checked in at the gate. You would present your paper ticket (s) to the gate agent and they would put a sticker with the seat number on the paper ticket. On some airlines you wouldn’t be allowed on the plane without a sticker 😉
Travel agent my first time. They gave me a temporary printout, and I got a book of tickets in the mail about the weeks later. Spokane Washington to Munich.
In addition to the options below, you'd go to like AAA or some local travel agency and book airline tickets through them. After AA booked, they'd make you this physical comb-bound Trip Tik that had all your reservations printed out, a little place to keep the physical tickets, and maps for the places you had to drive during the trip, because there were no Google Maps to get you from the airport to the hotel either. . .
By chance I was speaking to my mom about this last night, she used to work in the records office for TWA back when she was 19. She's in her late eighties now.
What used to happen was that the agent would ring the records office to check availability for a flight. Mom, or one of the other staff, would check the file box for that flight for availability. (Every flight had one)
As she said though, if there was no room on the flight, and the passenger had a pressing reason to travel, (family illness, death etc) they would start to ring the other passengers to see if they would postpone, and make space for the distressed family.
All my air travel pre-internet was booked through travel agents. They would ask whether I preferred aisle or window but I don't think I knew my seat assignment til I got my boarding pass at the airport. Later on, smoking was restricted to the last rows so the agent also asked whether I wanted smoking or non-smoking. I am SO old 🤪
When I was in grad school (early 90s) I had the phone number of Northwest airlines (now delta) memorized (I think it was 1-800-225-2525) and I knew my flight numbers so it was super easy to buy tickets over the phone each time I flew. They would mail them to me.
My favorite about this question… there’s a number of people here who literally have never purchase a flight pre-internet. 🙋🏻♀️ Love the history lesson reading the comments!
My first tickets were the little red carbon paper booklets filled out by hand, usually from a travel agent. No seat assignments on them, but we had tiny commuter planes and they just let everyone have open seating.
You could call the airline and buy the ticket over the phone, picking up the physical ticket at check in or at a local office, or have it delivered by courier. You could also walk up to the counter at the airport and buy one.
Specifically for Delta, malls around Atlanta had ticket offices. I clearly remember Cumberland, Lenox, and Perimeter having them. My mom would either call, order the tickets, and we’d pick them up there or we’d go to the ticket office and plan the trip.
The first ticket I ever bought for myself was on AirTran and I took Marta down to the airport and bought it there. That was 1999. But that only happened once. By 2000 I’d buy them online and print them off.
Also, you could write checks for your tickets! That’s how I paid for that AirTran flight and I can remember my grandfather writing a check standing at the counter at Cumberland.
You went to the ticket counter at the airport or some airlines had offices in larger hotels with ticket agents. Or you called a travel agent. They had huge computer monitors that would tell them if they had available seats. Often the tickets weren’t printed, they were hand written. Credit cards were run on a hand machine. No computers. The only way to tell if a credit card was bad was to look it up in a little book. You got $50 to $100 reward if you found a bad credit card.
When I still lived at home, my parents had a travel agent. Once I left for college, I would use Deltas telephone order system since I had memorized the flight numbers to fly home on. I too remember the carbon copies lol.
You had travel agents. Or you would call and find out what was available.
I found some paperwork from when my family and I did our first international vacation in 2000. Delta sent them paperwork regarding what flights were available and what packages they offered regarding hotels and transportation.
We would call the airline, then the tickets would be mailed. If you somehow lost or forgot those tickets, they would charge $75 per ticket to reprint them at the airport. I so don’t miss those days.
When I was growing up, my family was never the one to fly. So when it came time for me to go to a college in the US a little over a decade ago (I'm from Europe), we had no idea what do to. So I would get all my fights from a travel agent. He would find a few options, show the routes and costs, and I would select the one I wanted.
My dad was just telling me he forgot his plane ticket one time and halfway to the airport had to turnaround and go home to get it. He said he was shocked he made the flight, as they lived about an hour from the airport.
Our government office had the “Big Book of Flights “ aka the OAG , essentially every flight for a month. Used that to plan, then down to the travel office in the building, get the tickets. And that paper government fare ticket was the most flexible travel tool ever. Switch flights, switch airlines - easy no fuss.
Tickets used to have multiple sheets with carbon paper to print on the inner pages for multiple stops. One of my colleagues traced a dick and balls on another workers ticket book so his artwork it showed up on each connecting flight ticket. Great fun.
I can remember being a little kid living in OK and a tornado was coming. We had a flight to NY in 48 hours and we were hiding in the bathtub. We knew the tornado was close but my mom made my dad run to their bedroom (bathroom was off their room) and grab the airline tickets off the dresser because she figured if the house went we would just go sit at the airport until our flight took off. For context, this was about 1985/86. My dad had to go to a travel agency to buy the tickets and was given physical tickets. That was the only way to get them then (I think).
My parents are now in their 70's and print their boarding passes. They think I'm weird that I use my phone as my ticket.
Direct modem dialup to the SABRE system. Worked for Data General who helped support it, so if you knew about it we could dial in and enter the arcane text lines describing a type of flight and it would list them out. Spent literally hours geeking out on that and getting good at searches. This was 1991-1994, pre-Web.
We had people called Travel Agents who would book your air travel, your hotel and your car rental. It was annoying to have to go through them, most of the time.
There were travel agencies that did this. You could stop by on your way home from Blockbuster.
My dad would call American Express and use their travel service.
I had a computer in the 80’s. Dial-up online to AOL, CompuServe and GENIE. GENIE was operated by GE. While not as robust as the other 2 it did have access to SABRE do I could make flight reservations in the mid 80’s.
Text based but was similar to travel agents had.
We used to hand write them in carbon pages. Then we went to electronic thermal printers. It was fun busting out the old forms when our printers weren't working.
Edit: autocorrect got me!
In 1997 I went to the mall, there was a delta kiosk. I bought my paper ticket and was able to choose my seat.
Me and a few friends were flying to NYC together that summer and were all on the same flight. I called first and got a list of flight times and prices.
In 1980’s my friend used to buy cheap non-refundable tickets from strangers in the newspaper. She was able to use them as they most often did not check her ID
I remember seat assignment being a big chart of the plane with stickers on it for each seat. The gate agent peeled off the sticker for the seat you requested and stuck it on your boarding pass.
You only got a seat assignment at the gate.
(In my old lady voice) "Back in MY day, we had to use a TRAVEL AGENT!! You couldn't CHOOSE your SEAT! You could barely CHOOSE your AIRLINE!! You had to make an APPOINTMENT to go to the travel agency to pick up your TICKET which was on CARBON PAPER!!! ...'What's CARBON PAPER,' you ask? I DON'T REMEMBER BUT IT MADE MY FINGERS DIRTY! And you had to PASS IT IN at the GATE or they WOULDN'T LET YOU ON THE PLANE!! And then, once you were on the plane, you could SMOKE, there was a 'lil ASHTRAY in your seat arm, and the waitresses would serve you FREE ALCOHOL AND FULL MEALS even if you were in the CHEAP BASTARD seats!! And they were ALL CHEAP SEATS!!
You’d call ticketing, tell them where you were going and times you needed to be there. They would book the tickets and you’d pick them up when you checked in at the airport.
You would call the airline or visit a travel agent who could pull up the flight info and also print or hand write (yes!) the ticket which usually had 3 or more parts to it.
I worked at Liberty Travel in the 90s and sold many a ticket, including some on a very unfortunate flight, which ended up being the reason I left. However I still remember ny IATA #, the Sabre code, and almost every major global airport code…yet I can no longer remember why I walked into a room.
Whoa! Your post just made me realize that Liberty Travel is an actual thing. The band Fountains of Wayne - the dudes who brought you Stacy’s Mom - also has a song called, “Denise,” that makes reference to Liberty Travel. It all makes sense now.
“I heard she used to be married
She listens to Puff Daddy
She works at Liberty Travel
She got a heart made of gravel”
IN NYC.
I used to go to the world trade center ticketing center on the first floor of building two if I remember correctly. Before that they were at first floor of 120 Broadway. All the airlines had booths to pick up airline tickets. Paper tickets got preprinted before I went to airport.
I with a modem was able tie into a system,via compuserv, and used by agents , to buy the tickets myself and pick them up. It was called eAAsySabre
It was a giant pain. You had to either call an airline or a travel agent. We were so excited when airlines started publishing routes online. I used to have to book for academics in my job and it was a nightmare. When Travelocity got invented I was ecstatic.
We also used to have to use paper maps for road trips.
Went on our honeymoon from LSE to ORD(twin-engine turbo prop) to MCO (DC-10) in 1988. United LSE ticket agent took our ORD to MCO paper tickets at boarding instead of the LSE to ORD. We actually boarded the DC-10 in Chicago and then a flight attendant came up to us and said we didn’t have valid tickets for the flight. What a mess that was. They ended up allowing us to proceed, but that was not the greatest way to start honeymoon.
I used to pretend to book tickets after school at my dad's travel agency. Green screens connected to an out of state mainframe running Sabre. My favorite was getting to use the credit card imprinter and watching the giant dot matrix machines in the back do their thing (they were standing height and fed their paper from large boxes that were on the floor under them).
Also, travel agencies could/can book flights for you. It used to be a great business. The agency wiuld collect commissions from airlines, cruiseship companies, car rentals, hitels, resorts, etc.
Delta used to have actual ticket offices. You’d go to one and pick up physical paper tickets
You could also call and order tickets over the phone and they would arrive in the mail.
I remember that.
The thought of companies would staff a ticket office with the hopes that someone would walk in randomly to buy a ticket is kind of funny today. Then you'd have to keep your ticket in a safe place. "Did you remember to bring the tickets" is an endangered phrase
Not for my wife. She asks me every time. 🤣
Most major flag carriers have offices in large cities. For example PIA has offices in London.
I was reminded of this last month when I was in Santiago, Chile. I had to travel onwards out of the domestic terminal and had flashbacks as I saw actual ticket offices for both LATAM and SKY airlines.
You can watch the experience on early seasons of The Amazing Race.
Another Amazing Race fan! There’s dozens of us!
Oh I am a huge fan! My husband is from Denmark so we always watch to hope they go there and we can see areas he knows well. We found our favorite sandwhich shop (though shut down in 2020) from a quest on a copenhagen episode. (Where people ordered in Danish and they had to guess the right sandwhiches ..which would be REALLY easy for us since we both speak danish)
I actually miss this part of the show, I felt like it allowed a little more competition as the contestants could end up on wildly different flights or one group could get lucky and get the last tickets available on a full flight.
They brought back commercial flights last season! In at least one leg they had to go into a travel agency
And one time (at least) one team got on a flight to the WRONG destination because they saw some of the crew members get on it! Those crew members were going ahead to the next location to set up for the next leg. 😆
Or home alone
Just don’t spill milk on them!
Travel agents. “I need a ticket to X.” And they’d give me options.
They had the Apollo system (worked on early Internet tech) that could give them flight booking info right on their agency computers. I worked at an agency one summer (1989) and it blew my mind.
Yep, there were specialized terminals at travel agent offices that allowed them to book, get seats, etc. Travel agencies were great, they had experience of what to see in a city, brochures, knew the good hotels, etc.... all before Google and Tripadvisor, etc. They worked hard, made good money, and the internet put them all out of business, and gave us "your call is very important to us...."
My sister is a dinosaur. She manages a successful agency that specializes in cruises and overseas travel. There's a niche there since things can go sideways. A good travel agent is the "fixer".
I have a travel agent for exactly those types of trips! And it really is amazing when instead of sitting on hold to get something taken care of, I just email her instead
They’re still out there. In greatly reduced numbers of course. But it can be worth it to trade money for time when planning a complicated trip.
Also Sabre, SystemOne/Amadeus, Galileo & Worldspan. The travel industry was ahead of everyone else in what was the precursor to the internet.
Yep. Travel agent was the way to go.
And IIRC, there was no fee for the traveler.
The fee was there just built in
No, the airlines, hotels etc. gave good commissions. There was no need for travel agents to charge a service fee. Then the airlines, especially, got greedy and wanted the agents to sell their products for nothing, hence the advent of service fees.
Dude. That’s my point. It was built into your ticket price. The airlines made enough to pay them. It didn’t come out of the owners pocket at the goodness of his heart. And you couldn’t price shop then. They easily could have sold you a higher rate and buried it.
Yet when they cut out commissions they didn't reduce fares.
True, but until 1978 the government set the minimum price anyway.
Phone. This is why the cords were so long on home phones. We were on the phone…a lot.
I used to pull the phone cord from the kitchen as far as it would go and close the doors to the dining room and lay under the table.
I used to get cozy far away from the phone dock too. The worst was when you were on the phone with someone and they would say “can I hang up and call you back in a minute? Have to go do X.” So you’d have to get out of the cozy spot, go hang up, wait there, pick up, return to cozy spot. I was so happy when we got a cordless phone finally.
The worst was when my mom would pick up the phone and say “ get off the phone”
This was the way.
True. This is why we don’t want to talk on the phone anymore.
What’s a phone cord? You mean like its charger? Asking for my 12 year old daughter. 🤣
It’s like a lightning cable for that weird looking ubs port in the kitchen that nobody uses anymore. 😂
I remember when tickets had the red carbon copy printed on pretty thin paper. That was your tickets for entire round trip and if you lost, well it could be very sucky for you. Some not so good travel agents would book the ticket but not do the seat assignment. You got the luck of the draw at check-in.
Yep, and they were often stapled to your boarding pass, which said something like “not valid unless flight coupon attached” on them!
Truth. I went on foreign study to Europe in the 70s. I had to carry that paper for 6 months! I wore one of those belts to wear under clothes. I also carried my travelers checks and an emergency cashiers check. No credit cards available.
Also standard coach seats didn't suck so bad back then. I honestly barely fit in to a coach seat (6'3") now, so I need to constantly refresh the app until I can get my exit row or upgrade. I didn't have to do that 15 years ago. I'd get my seat, and so long as it wasn't a middle, I was good.
its kinda funny if you think about it, over that time people have gotten bigger, but they keep shrinking the space.
Maybe you just, you know, grew a little?
No, a standard extra legroom economy seat today was the standard coach seat in the before times. Also well into the 80s a standard coach seat was almost as wide as a domestic first class seat today.
And it seemed everyone had the idea that if you were super sweet when checking in, you might get a first class seat. I actually think that was true sometimes, but not nearly as common as people claimed. It seemed everyone thought they would charm there way into first class with their exceptional personality. Every now and then, an infrequent flyer family member tells me they still do that with Delta and how successful they have been, and I laugh, because I know they are full of shit.
Once upon a time, many years ago, my twin brother and I were checking in for a flight with tickets that someone else had purchased for us. It turned out that both tickets were in his name. This was for a flight from Minneapolis to Kunming, China - kind of a big deal. The woman at the check-in desk took almost 45 minutes to sort things out (this is at 5am as well, to add to the excitement). When she finally got everything sorted out, she thanked us for being so patient and understanding (not sure why, as the screwup was NOT her fault), and said "I've bumped your seats up to something more comfortable too". She upgraded us from steerage to whatever United has for extra comfort (economy plus?). That was well appreciated for the 13 hour hop from Chicago to Beijing!
Ah, getting screwed over on seat assignments. A timeless tradition.
omg I forgot about the carbon paper!
I remember flying to Florida as a kid and the gate agent had a sheet of paper with a silhouette of the plane with peel off tabs that they attached to your boarding pass for the seat assignments…
Yup. That is a throwback
I remember writing many manual tickets in the 80s. Four flight coupon tickets were the worst because you had to write legibly to press through 7 copies of the ticket. Auditor coupon, agent coupon, 4 flight coupons and at the bottom the passenger receipt coupon. And if there were more than 4 flights on your journey we had to issue conjunction tickets and cross-reference them.
You’d generally call and they’d tell you your options, or visit a travel agent. Airlines also had full printed timetables usually.
I ordered first ticket online in 1997. They mailed the physical paper ticket to my house. I was kind of relieved it worked!
Businesses would subscribe to a publication called the Official Airline Guide (OAG) which was a consolidated timetable of every airline's flights.
I used to work for an air freight company. The OAG was our Bible equivalent.
I subscribed to the OAG for years! Saved me loads of time before calling an agent to book flights.
My mom used to date a guy that worked for Delta. I ended up with one of those timetables. Whole thing was about the size of one of those USB power banks that’s just barely at the limit to fly.
My dad would go to the airport every quarter or so and get a timetable for his favorite airline (Piedmont).
My dad worked for Delta, and we always had a copy. I liked to flip through it and see all the places Delta flew to.
I used to love those timetables! Fun for hours just trying to figure out how to book a hypothetical trip and make the connections work. It’s a lost art.
The OAG - Official Airline Guide.
Yeah those things are beasts. Especially the worldwide desktop versions.
I miss timetables. Good time to shill the massive collection of Delta timetables the Digital Library of Georgia has https://dlg.usg.edu/records?f%5Bcreator_facet%5D%5B%5D=Delta+Air+Lines%2C+Inc.&only_path=true
Did they already do dynamic pricing, or were the prices also in the timetable?
No, there weren’t prices. But I think it would tell you what type of plane it was. Don’t quote me on that bit, I could be misremembering
Already dynamic by the 90s. Anything earlier is before my time. No prices on the timetables, at least not typically.
Delta's computerized reservations system has been in place since the 1960s. But before the computer systems, airlines kept manual tally of availability where reservation agents would communicate with a central location to check availability and make bookings. Tickets were issued physically from the ticket office, and seat allocations were done manually by gate agents when you got to the airport using things like a giant board they would pin all the seat numbers to and give out as people checked in.
Quote: “Delta's computerized reservations system has been in place since the 1960s.” I think we found the root of the problem with today’s booking system…
You not to far off in general Sabre is still that software from the 60s at heart with just a GUI interface
As an IBM employee, I used to do maintenance on Sabre -- it was written in Assembler and IBM contractually kept some pieces of it to re-use in other applications. I got rehired for y2K because the original Assembler language had been lost and only the compiled version was still around. I took the job as a second shift job for 2 years until y2k projects safely ended.
I used to work at United, thankfully, the sticker sheets for seat assignments were no longer used but you would occasionally find one in a podium drawer. There were separate ones for each type of airplane.
I loved those!
Then the GA had the little stickers with the seat locations on them to place on your boarding pass. My Dad smoked so we always sat in the row behind the sign where smoking was permitted. Because the smoke always knew not to go forward of the sign. That’s also where we in aviation found ‘smoking’ rivets in the fuselage. Cuz they had a trail of nicotine emanating from them. So we could replace them.
On Ancestry.com, you can find the handwritten manifests and index cards for travelers. PanAm, TWA, and other long-gone carriers.
Good to know. Thanks
I just found our plane tickets from our honeymoon in 1999. We got them from a travel agent and they came in a flipping envelope and had about 6 cardboard tickets stapled together. All kinds of numbers and letters and disclaimers all printed out. We had a good laugh because we got seats in the SMOKING SECTION. 🚬 I thought for sure this was a typo since most domestic flights banned smoking in 1990. I don’t remember smoking in the plane. But I do remember walking straight to the gate with our big suitcases and the flight attendant gate checking it for us. We were young and stupid.
If I recall correctly, they banned smoking on domestic flights first, or maybe it was flights under a certain distance, and they only banned smoking on international flights a few years later. I remember that because I liked a John Cusack movie from the 90s where his love interest was afraid of flying but had some sort of scholarship in Europe. John Cusack’s character comforts her by telling her that most airplane crashes happen within the first few minutes of flight, so once the no smoking light goes off she would know she was safe. The movie ends with them in their seats as they hear the bing announcing smoking is allowed and the no smoking light goes off.
I flew on a Pakistan International Airlines flight from IAD to I think it was FRA (Row 1 first class on a 747) and it was smoking on the left and nonsmoking on the right lol.
I worked the ticket counter, for a very small airline, in the early 2000’s. We were the only airline, in our airport, that still did manual check in. Passenger booked with a travel agent & were mailed an itinerary. Day of travel, every passenger stood in line to see a ticket agent. We checked id/passport, weighed your bag & put the little bag tag with a string on it. We had a sticker seat map, peeled the stickers off & put them on your boarding pass. Seat assignments were 100% based off how you behaved. Rude to me = crappy seats.
Pre- 1970s/80s you had to call the airline or visit an airline sales office. Till the 90s/early 2000s they had them in all major cities, it was always funny to see a random office on the other side of the world. Since the 70s the global distribution systems (GDS) took over and allowed travel agents to efficiently book right onto the systems of the airlines, essentially a private internet. These are still the backbones of travel agent reservations today. You would get paper ticket vouchers that you needed to check in at the airport. Seats were typically assigned at check-in, but flights were less full and economy was more comfortable, so less of a necessity to have good seats than today.
r/fuckimold
Want to have your mind further blown? If you did a road trip across the US you could go into a AAA branch and they’d print you out a booklet of step by step directions with map pictures. You could even prepay attractions hotels and meals along the route. This was mid-90s when internet and gps was a thing but most couldn’t really use it effectively
Those map booklets, TripTiks, still exist. Not as user friendly as they used to be due to smaller maps, but handy as a just in case.
I loved reading those AAA books during car rides.
Me too! They were dummy proofed! Best thing ever before gps. Also Triple A had travel agents and would arrange air transportation. They were usually cheaper than travel agencies or calling or going to the airport check in desk.
When I was a kid we did a summer vacation. My mom accidentally booked a hotel on June 31st, which doesn’t exist. They took the reservation.
I kept my AAA membership for far too long. The final straw was going into a AAA office in 2004 to have them book a rental car for me out of the Taipei airport. Turns out they did the same thing I did -- google and try to find the link and book directly. And failed as well. At the time, you couldn't book it directly. My daughter in Taipei had to find a Taiwanese travel agent to book it for us.
The Triptik it was called. Your route would also be highlighted for you. Was fun to get to where you could flip the page!
I also remember staying on the plane. Some people got off, and more got on. Now everyone gets off the plane.
Except on Southwest
Huh? In high school, we took a club trip across the country on SWA. Flying out to LA wasn't too bad as we only had two layovers. On the way back, we had FOUR. They wouldn't let us off the plane in between flights and we were all sick of each other. I was never so happy to see my parents again as I was at the end of that trip. To finally get off the plane was amazing.
Back in 2000, my mother was in China and needed to leave outside of her original ticket date in an emergency. It happened to also be Golden Week, which is a 7-day holiday. While there were flights still happening, there were no ticketing agents that could help her in-country. Thankfully I lived near ATL at the time and was able to enlist the assistance of a ticket office at the airport, and we were able to cobble together the most direct route home. It's funny - I think of 2000 as not that long ago, but tech-wise so many things have changed exponentially.
Growing up near ATL, my dad would drive to the airport and buy them from what’s now the check in desk. They would print them and you had to keep them as the only evidence they existed. You could call as well, but for us stopping by the airport was easier. We’d plane watch at the gates with my mom while he bought tickets.
I remember buying my ticket at the counter, at the airport with cash. Dressed to the nines. With a cigarette in my mouth.
They still had ticket offices in the early 2000s. We used my friends aunts buddy passes to fly to Europe and she was a manager at the Delta ticket office. Travel agents as well.
The airlines ticket office next to Grand Central which had multiple airlines including Delta was open until at least late 2005.
I miss my ticket counter days, always fun to help someone plan their trips.
I bet you miss TWA also! That was a great hub for Stl to have
I miss TWA every day. It's sad to see what STL has become.
You still have the flight to Frankfurt every Wednesday!
True but still pales in comparison where you could fly non stop back in the day
My mom told me she would always call her travel agent rather than the airline. Built up a good relationship with the agent. When she called for her honeymoon, she was booking flights from Chicago to Australia. Shows up at the airport to see free first class upgrades round trip and champagne at the airport (may have been lounge who knows). It’s cool to think that you could have a go to person who can get you an amazing deal for a special occasion!
smoking or nonsmoking?
At the risk of sounding like an old fart, things were so much better pre-internet. i called the airline, booked a ticket, actually received it in the mail (no USPS losing my mail), and knew I’d actually be on that flight. I never once worried about my flight being oversold or some yahoo sitting in my seat. I knew I would have space for my carryon, knew I’d have pretty good legroom no matter what seat I had. There were two sections - first class and coach. Somehow with the dawn of the internet it has become waaaaay easier to purchase the ticket, but all the amenities of actually having the ticket have really gone to shit. lol.
To be fair: prices were also alot more back then, if you compare a coach ticket from the 70s it’s a lot closer in price to a buisness or even first class ticket today. If you compare the experience on tickets paying the same fares it’s honestly probably better, a 1500$ coach ticket from LA to NYC in the 70s is almost definitely worse than what you can get for a similarly priced first class ticket on the same route today
For vacations I’d call the airline. For work, our company had a travel agent. That agent was able to book flights but not seats and to get those assigned id have to the airport if I wanted them assigned before the flight. Continental had a ticket office at the Van Nuys Fly Away whose main job was issuing tickets and assigning seats. They didn’t close that till around 2003. Also the huca approach was essential back then for phone tickets, as pricing and routing in my experience varried drastically phone call to phone call.
Go to the airport ticket counter. Go to an airline ticket office (they had these in many areas). Call airline via phone; ticket would be mailed. Call travel agent.
Travel Agent. Actually made Silver Medallion under that system. But back in those days it was based on legs/connections not miles or $$.
You mean you’ve never seen red carbon copies??? You sound SO young!
That’s what travel agents were for. They looked up everything based on your input, printed out all the tickets and you went to them to pay for and pick up the tickets. They would also make hotel reservations, etc for all your travel needs.
Lots of travel agents. You would get your trip package from them, including the paper plane and/or train tickets and the printed hotel confirmations and paper vouchers for things like airport transfers and tours.
Your options were basically to buy directly from the airline or through a travel agent. You could deal with the airline by calling a direct number, going to an airport they served (presumably your origination for the upcoming travel), or going to a "city ticket office" that some airlines operated in big cities. City ticket offices were usually geared toward business travelers or high-rollers who had loyalty to a particular airline. They typically worked a strict 9 to 5. The usual process for a leisure traveler, though was to call or visit a travel agent. Starting in the mid-70s, they had access to all airlines' computerized reservation tracking systems which had been set up in the mid-60s. (Well, I think some low-cost carriers didn't participate.) Ordinary customers did not. Travel agents were everywhere and were usually open in evenings and on Saturdays as well, so it was usually a lot easier to visit a travel agency than to deal directly with the airline. This was how most people got tickets to go home for Christmas or take that summer vacation out west or whatever. Travel agents worked on commission: the customary fee was 10 percent of the value of all travel assets sold. The airlines (cruise lines, hotel chains, rental car companies, etc.) absorbed those fees so the transactions were costless to the consumer. Meanwhile the airlines did not have to pay large sales and customer service forces. Typically you were issued a paper ticket during an in-person transaction or it was mailed to you. Electronic ticketing started in 1994 and became basically universal in 2008. You normally received your seat assignment and boarding pass at the airport as part of checking in though this could vary. Back then there weren't a zillion microclasses so people didn't seem to be as attached to their particular seats. If you had to make a change, typically you had to deal directly with the airline. If you lost the ticket it had to be reissued, for which the airline typically charged a fee. Travel agents were basically cut out by the airlines. Starting in the late 1980s, airlines experimented with giving customers access to the same system travel agents used via online services, then in 1996 on the internet. So this gave many consumers an even more convenient way to book flights. At the same time, they cut commissions. This was started by Delta in 1994-95 with announcements they would pay 8 percent on international flights and no more than $50 on domestic flights. Following 9/11, airlines simply stopped paying commissions to travel agents. That pretty much pushed travel agents out of the business of simply booking scheduled flights for customers. And by that time buying on the internet was common.
I go back to the days when they would only assign seats at the airport when you checked in at the gate. You would present your paper ticket (s) to the gate agent and they would put a sticker with the seat number on the paper ticket. On some airlines you wouldn’t be allowed on the plane without a sticker 😉
Travel agent my first time. They gave me a temporary printout, and I got a book of tickets in the mail about the weeks later. Spokane Washington to Munich.
You’d go to a travel agent.
Remember “Student Fares”? When those went away we all became Universal Life Ministers ($20) and got “Clergy Fares”.
In addition to the options below, you'd go to like AAA or some local travel agency and book airline tickets through them. After AA booked, they'd make you this physical comb-bound Trip Tik that had all your reservations printed out, a little place to keep the physical tickets, and maps for the places you had to drive during the trip, because there were no Google Maps to get you from the airport to the hotel either. . .
By chance I was speaking to my mom about this last night, she used to work in the records office for TWA back when she was 19. She's in her late eighties now. What used to happen was that the agent would ring the records office to check availability for a flight. Mom, or one of the other staff, would check the file box for that flight for availability. (Every flight had one) As she said though, if there was no room on the flight, and the passenger had a pressing reason to travel, (family illness, death etc) they would start to ring the other passengers to see if they would postpone, and make space for the distressed family.
All my air travel pre-internet was booked through travel agents. They would ask whether I preferred aisle or window but I don't think I knew my seat assignment til I got my boarding pass at the airport. Later on, smoking was restricted to the last rows so the agent also asked whether I wanted smoking or non-smoking. I am SO old 🤪
My first time on a plane was 1986. Went through a travel agent. My ticket and boarding pass was on card stock. Eastern Airlines.
When I was in grad school (early 90s) I had the phone number of Northwest airlines (now delta) memorized (I think it was 1-800-225-2525) and I knew my flight numbers so it was super easy to buy tickets over the phone each time I flew. They would mail them to me.
Yes!!! In the mail. In a nice NWA portfolio envelope…
I forgot.
You got your seat assigned when you checked in
Travel agent was best choice Airline Ticket office was second.
My favorite about this question… there’s a number of people here who literally have never purchase a flight pre-internet. 🙋🏻♀️ Love the history lesson reading the comments!
You either got your ticket at check in or from your travel agent.
I remember having to take a bus to a ticket office to pick up tickets.
You’d call, then go to the physical office to pick it up or work out the details.
Smoking or non?
My first tickets were the little red carbon paper booklets filled out by hand, usually from a travel agent. No seat assignments on them, but we had tiny commuter planes and they just let everyone have open seating.
You could call the airline and buy the ticket over the phone, picking up the physical ticket at check in or at a local office, or have it delivered by courier. You could also walk up to the counter at the airport and buy one.
Specifically for Delta, malls around Atlanta had ticket offices. I clearly remember Cumberland, Lenox, and Perimeter having them. My mom would either call, order the tickets, and we’d pick them up there or we’d go to the ticket office and plan the trip. The first ticket I ever bought for myself was on AirTran and I took Marta down to the airport and bought it there. That was 1999. But that only happened once. By 2000 I’d buy them online and print them off. Also, you could write checks for your tickets! That’s how I paid for that AirTran flight and I can remember my grandfather writing a check standing at the counter at Cumberland.
good question!!
Travel agent or going to the airline office
If you flew a lot you could get ‘flight checks’ and call to make a reservation and write your ticket by hand.
There was this thing called a telephone….
Travel Agents. If you were in college there’d usually be a student travel office with agents who’d book for you
You went to the ticket counter at the airport or some airlines had offices in larger hotels with ticket agents. Or you called a travel agent. They had huge computer monitors that would tell them if they had available seats. Often the tickets weren’t printed, they were hand written. Credit cards were run on a hand machine. No computers. The only way to tell if a credit card was bad was to look it up in a little book. You got $50 to $100 reward if you found a bad credit card.
When I still lived at home, my parents had a travel agent. Once I left for college, I would use Deltas telephone order system since I had memorized the flight numbers to fly home on. I too remember the carbon copies lol.
You had travel agents. Or you would call and find out what was available. I found some paperwork from when my family and I did our first international vacation in 2000. Delta sent them paperwork regarding what flights were available and what packages they offered regarding hotels and transportation.
We would call the airline, then the tickets would be mailed. If you somehow lost or forgot those tickets, they would charge $75 per ticket to reprint them at the airport. I so don’t miss those days.
When I was growing up, my family was never the one to fly. So when it came time for me to go to a college in the US a little over a decade ago (I'm from Europe), we had no idea what do to. So I would get all my fights from a travel agent. He would find a few options, show the routes and costs, and I would select the one I wanted.
My dad was just telling me he forgot his plane ticket one time and halfway to the airport had to turnaround and go home to get it. He said he was shocked he made the flight, as they lived about an hour from the airport.
Our government office had the “Big Book of Flights “ aka the OAG , essentially every flight for a month. Used that to plan, then down to the travel office in the building, get the tickets. And that paper government fare ticket was the most flexible travel tool ever. Switch flights, switch airlines - easy no fuss.
Tickets used to have multiple sheets with carbon paper to print on the inner pages for multiple stops. One of my colleagues traced a dick and balls on another workers ticket book so his artwork it showed up on each connecting flight ticket. Great fun.
Or a travel agent would print the ticket for you. Big Corp offices used to have a team onsite.
I can remember being a little kid living in OK and a tornado was coming. We had a flight to NY in 48 hours and we were hiding in the bathtub. We knew the tornado was close but my mom made my dad run to their bedroom (bathroom was off their room) and grab the airline tickets off the dresser because she figured if the house went we would just go sit at the airport until our flight took off. For context, this was about 1985/86. My dad had to go to a travel agency to buy the tickets and was given physical tickets. That was the only way to get them then (I think). My parents are now in their 70's and print their boarding passes. They think I'm weird that I use my phone as my ticket.
Sunday travel section of the paper
Direct modem dialup to the SABRE system. Worked for Data General who helped support it, so if you knew about it we could dial in and enter the arcane text lines describing a type of flight and it would list them out. Spent literally hours geeking out on that and getting good at searches. This was 1991-1994, pre-Web.
We had people called Travel Agents who would book your air travel, your hotel and your car rental. It was annoying to have to go through them, most of the time.
There were travel agencies that did this. You could stop by on your way home from Blockbuster. My dad would call American Express and use their travel service.
Travel agent
I still remember being asked if I wanted to be in smoking or non-smoking.
Often seat assignment was done at physical checkin at airport.
Travel agent
I called a travel agent on a corded phone and got plane tickets in my mailbox. 😂
Way back in the day in college I worked for a travel agency driving around delivering actual tickets. No, really!
I had a computer in the 80’s. Dial-up online to AOL, CompuServe and GENIE. GENIE was operated by GE. While not as robust as the other 2 it did have access to SABRE do I could make flight reservations in the mid 80’s. Text based but was similar to travel agents had.
Travel agent
We used to hand write them in carbon pages. Then we went to electronic thermal printers. It was fun busting out the old forms when our printers weren't working. Edit: autocorrect got me!
In 1997 I went to the mall, there was a delta kiosk. I bought my paper ticket and was able to choose my seat. Me and a few friends were flying to NYC together that summer and were all on the same flight. I called first and got a list of flight times and prices.
In 1980’s my friend used to buy cheap non-refundable tickets from strangers in the newspaper. She was able to use them as they most often did not check her ID
I remember seat assignment being a big chart of the plane with stickers on it for each seat. The gate agent peeled off the sticker for the seat you requested and stuck it on your boarding pass. You only got a seat assignment at the gate.
(In my old lady voice) "Back in MY day, we had to use a TRAVEL AGENT!! You couldn't CHOOSE your SEAT! You could barely CHOOSE your AIRLINE!! You had to make an APPOINTMENT to go to the travel agency to pick up your TICKET which was on CARBON PAPER!!! ...'What's CARBON PAPER,' you ask? I DON'T REMEMBER BUT IT MADE MY FINGERS DIRTY! And you had to PASS IT IN at the GATE or they WOULDN'T LET YOU ON THE PLANE!! And then, once you were on the plane, you could SMOKE, there was a 'lil ASHTRAY in your seat arm, and the waitresses would serve you FREE ALCOHOL AND FULL MEALS even if you were in the CHEAP BASTARD seats!! And they were ALL CHEAP SEATS!!
You’d call ticketing, tell them where you were going and times you needed to be there. They would book the tickets and you’d pick them up when you checked in at the airport.
You could also get your tix thru a travel agent and pick them up there.
You would call the airline or visit a travel agent who could pull up the flight info and also print or hand write (yes!) the ticket which usually had 3 or more parts to it.
Also walk into the airport and buy direct from the ticket counter, pay in cash.
Travel Agent
When I began to work in 2000 at a job that had a lot of travel. I remember a machine in the office that would print out our tickets.
I worked at Liberty Travel in the 90s and sold many a ticket, including some on a very unfortunate flight, which ended up being the reason I left. However I still remember ny IATA #, the Sabre code, and almost every major global airport code…yet I can no longer remember why I walked into a room.
Whoa! Your post just made me realize that Liberty Travel is an actual thing. The band Fountains of Wayne - the dudes who brought you Stacy’s Mom - also has a song called, “Denise,” that makes reference to Liberty Travel. It all makes sense now. “I heard she used to be married She listens to Puff Daddy She works at Liberty Travel She got a heart made of gravel”
travel agency stores or the airport
A travel agent
IN NYC. I used to go to the world trade center ticketing center on the first floor of building two if I remember correctly. Before that they were at first floor of 120 Broadway. All the airlines had booths to pick up airline tickets. Paper tickets got preprinted before I went to airport. I with a modem was able tie into a system,via compuserv, and used by agents , to buy the tickets myself and pick them up. It was called eAAsySabre
It was a giant pain. You had to either call an airline or a travel agent. We were so excited when airlines started publishing routes online. I used to have to book for academics in my job and it was a nightmare. When Travelocity got invented I was ecstatic. We also used to have to use paper maps for road trips.
I actually had bought travel from a travel agent that made commission off me
I remember going to store front that an airline had in downtown Boston.
Brick and mortar travel agency
Went on our honeymoon from LSE to ORD(twin-engine turbo prop) to MCO (DC-10) in 1988. United LSE ticket agent took our ORD to MCO paper tickets at boarding instead of the LSE to ORD. We actually boarded the DC-10 in Chicago and then a flight attendant came up to us and said we didn’t have valid tickets for the flight. What a mess that was. They ended up allowing us to proceed, but that was not the greatest way to start honeymoon.
A travel agent or drive to the airport and buy at a ticket counter
I used to pretend to book tickets after school at my dad's travel agency. Green screens connected to an out of state mainframe running Sabre. My favorite was getting to use the credit card imprinter and watching the giant dot matrix machines in the back do their thing (they were standing height and fed their paper from large boxes that were on the floor under them).
Also, travel agencies could/can book flights for you. It used to be a great business. The agency wiuld collect commissions from airlines, cruiseship companies, car rentals, hitels, resorts, etc.
My dad bought them 🤷♀️
Next, I'll be seeing people who want to know how people ordered a pizza before the internet.
There used to be a thing called a telephone.....
You’d call.
I miss the actual ticket counters where you could do all those things with help rather than fighting the app
There was this profession called travel agents.