• U.S.

Airlines: Hot Tickets

3 minute read
TIME

To the discomfort of airlines struggling with summertime hordes of travelers, some jet-age gyps have discovered that they can literally write their own tickets. The tickets, stolen from travel agencies, have turned up over the past few months in Los Angeles, Miami, New York, Las Vegas and other U.S. cities, as well as London and Madrid. Trans World Airlines, for one, has been fleeced of nearly $100,000. Police report that the cost of the write-your-own-ticket racket may come to $4,000,000 or more in lost airline revenues.

Key to the caper is the fact that travel agencies, weary of handling different tickets for some 40 U.S. airlines, in 1965 began using a single form that can be filled out for any flight on any carrier. Crooks liked the idea too—and heisted 5,000 blanks last winter from three agencies in New York and California. The hot tickets are complete with forged agency stamps and authentic air-linese (“ORD” for Chicago’s O’Hare Airport, “FCO” for Rome’s Fiumicino Airport). One turned up for an around-the-world trip valued at $1,700.

Fare Games. The ticket takers bank on the average American’s ready belief that just about anything can be got wholesale (airline tickets cannot). Often the crooks pass the word around that they are part-time “travel consultants” authorized to sell “discount” tickets at 10% to 40% under regular fares. One Los Angeles con man had been making the rounds of airport bars and restaurants, offering to sacrifice his commission and sell tickets cheap so that he could “build up a large sales report.” Another imaginative fellow liked to tell prospects he was in the all-expenses-paid type of “prize business”—and would be glad to use his connections to get cut-rate tickets. Los Angeles police recently nabbed a half-dozen such characters.

Hoping to stop the phonies at the reservations counters, the airlines are offering clerks a $25 reward for each ticket they spot against a list of the stolen blanks’ serial numbers—which is the only way they can be positively detected. Meanwhile the lines are spreading the word that the discount tickets are no bargain. Passengers caught with them can be arrested for using stolen property, though unwitting travelers get off easily. Last month TWA investigators caught up with two young girls who had made it to Madrid on bogus tickets they had bought in Los Angeles. Convinced that the two were merely innocents abroad, TWA did not press charges—but the girls had to furnish the full fare for the plane ride home.

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