First it was peanuts. Now it is ticket jackets. As of today, Southwest Airlines will no longer offer a ticket jacket with your boarding pass. Frankly, I’m surprised they’ve lasted this long!
I feel like I’ve already lost many readers by even using that term. The concept of a ticket jacket seems so antiquated in 2019. Tickets (separate from boarding passes) used to be paper. The paper ticket itself was worth the value of the ticket. It was surrendered upon boarding while a carbon copy could be kept as a receipt. From that ticket, a boarding pass was generated indicating seat assignment.
Over the last two decades, we’ve moved away from paper tickets to purely electronic ticketing…the number of airlines which still use paper tickets is very small and to even see a paper ticket is a rare event.
While other airlines have eliminated ticket jackets years ago, they have persisted at Southwest Airlines. But as paper tickets have disappeared and paper boarding passes have also largely disappeared thanks to electronic boarding passes on smart phones, Southwest is finally pulling the plug on ticket jackets.
Amazingly, Southwest uses about 22 million ticket jackets per year. Southwest claims it is eliminating ticket jackets in order to:
Reduce waste, protect our environment, use less paper and ultimately become a greener company.
And of course to save money…
CONCLUSION
It’s the end of another era on Southwest. Southwest confirmation emails still say “Ticketless Travel Passenger Itinerary” which itself is a relic of the past. I can’t say that I’ll miss the peanuts or the ticket jackets, but this is another sign of the paperless era we are in.
And goods news for this packrat, who needs no temptation!
Will you miss the Southwest Airlines ticket jacket?
> Read More: The End Of An Era At Southwest Airlines
image: Southwest Airlines (R.J. Hinkle)
Wait, where can I get a paper ticket?
I miss the peanuts – I think it’s pathetic they don’t have them.
I miss the ticket jackets. I know it’s not good for the environment but I always felt so special with the ticket jacket and the bag tags attached to that. I remember the really nice different ones for international business class.
My thoughts exactly when I saw this early this morning. I was surprised. Seems like a waste of money in 2019. Ticket jackets are nice for complex ticketing with multiple boarding passes but Southwest usually wouldn’t have such a routing anyway.
I will miss the ticket jackets. I always use them or a substitute. In the last 5-10 years, fewer and fewer US airlines had them.
I use them for boarding passes (I don’t want to potentially have someone touch or look at my phone and battery life is increasing poor as my phone is 3 years old). Furthermore, I want a paper record. Thermal paper will fade, unfortunately, so maybe I might have to make a copy of it?
In recent years, I was conflicted about using a WN ticket jacket for non-WN flights. WN used to be worse of the worse US airlines but, even though it’s not true now, there still is a stigma with WN. I sometimes used an envelope and sometimes a credit card application as a folder for boarding passes and travel receipts.
I remember the days of the British Airways ticket jacket that was not thin paper but moderately thick cardboard, like a cereal box weight of paper.
RIP WN ticket jacket!
I miss the United gold ticket jackets with the tulip logo.
Back in the day, those ticket wallets could be 3 or 4 inches thick, as each airline required a separate paper ticket. I’m not sorry to see the end of them. The other scourge of air travel was the requirement to reconfirm tickets: and that often involved actually physically going to the airline office. Failure to do so would result in cancellation. Total PITA.
I will always remember these early tickets. Would have to fly to Brasil every summer from the US to go see the other half of my family. Carbon copies, ticket jackets, multiple stamps, etc.. I can’t believe my mother was even able to keep up. Those were the days and I will never forget. RIP Varig Airlines… 🙁