International Air Transport Association is working on five pilot projects to trial internet-only ticketing. Passengers use bar-coded boarding passes and radio frequency ID for luggage management.
Giovanni Bisignani, the association's chief executive, said his group would work with airlines to meet the 2007 deadline for scrapping paper tickets.
E-tickets could save over 1.5bn a year for the industry, and he said almost a fifth of tickets processed by IATA in 2004 were e-tickets. This is expected to double by the end of this year.
Bisignani was speaking at the Pacific Asia Travel Association conference in Macau last week and IATA represents 270 airlines, making up 98% of the world's scheduled air traffic.
Story by Jez Abbott
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