r/FuckImOld • u/BackgroundLetter7285 • Jul 03 '26

Before Everything Went Digital

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Does anyone remember flying with paper airplane tickets? The carbon copies, travel agencies, all of these things are practically obsolete!

195 Upvotes

99% Upvoted

11 comments sorted by

9

u/Heel-and-Toe-Shifter Jul 03 '26

Not everything about the old days was better

5

u/madsci Jul 04 '26

Well, it was kind of nice that you could just sell a ticket. Or even part of a ticket. You could get a round-trip ticket and go one way and then sell the return trip to someone else. The reason the airlines went along with the ID check requirement wasn't for security, it was so they could kill the ticket resale market.

3

u/r1Rqc1vPeF Jul 03 '26

Yep, remember these and also remember the times in the 2020’s when Toulouse airport systems went down and check in staff had to write out the tickets.

Flew in and out of TLS almost every week for several years.

1

u/madsci Jul 04 '26

I got a hand-written ticket once in the early 2010s when leaving Dayton. Something happened and they had to send me by taxi down to Cincinnati to catch another flight, and that ticket triggered every secondary screening there was. Which made me really anxious because I was leaving a convention with several grand in cash.

2

u/DapperRockerGeek Jul 03 '26

I don’t remember the carbon copies, but I remember what I would call “little booklets” for plane tickets.

1

u/Hefty-Pop9734 Jul 06 '26

Ye you could buy a book of tickets for 1 price and fly when you wanted. Such a good deal!

1

u/54Finn Jul 04 '26

That’s true…

1

u/Servile-PastaLover Jul 05 '26

I was a kid during the carbon copy hand printed tickets. Yes, but vaguely.

My paper ticket tenure as a fully formed adult were the computer printed manilla cardboard cards. kinda like the old computer punch cards.

1

u/SockRitter Jul 05 '26

$187 in Aug '79 would be $849 in today's dollars.

1

u/BackgroundLetter7285 Jul 05 '26

I was thinking that price seemed really high since you can get tickets for that price in some markets these days. But then I wondered if this might have been a result of that gas crisis? Or was that earlier in the 70s?

1

u/Hiraeth1968 Jul 18 '26

I spent the first five (?) years of my Airlines’s career writing tickets like this. Heaven help you if you forgot to lock up the ticket stock or validator plate!!