Editorial desk

ReservationPoints Onward Travel & Airline Policy Desk

This desk covers the airline side of onward travel: what a booking reference is, how long it stays live, and what a check-in agent sees when they type it in.

A desk is an editorial function at Reservation Points, not a person. Articles are assigned to the desk that owns the subject and the sources it is allowed to reason from. Both are stated below so you can check them.

What this desk covers

The onward-ticket product and the carrier side of the requirement. What a PNR is; what "booked but unticketed" means; ticket time limits and ADTK; validity windows; delivery speed; refunds and failure recovery; name corrections; what a check-in agent actually sees on screen; carrier liability, removal at carrier expense and fining regimes; airline-by-airline enforcement; vendor comparison. Also owns the Americas entry cluster.

What it reasons from

These are the classes of source this desk is permitted to use. Where a page states a rule, the rule is quoted from one of them, with the date it was read.

  • Airline Conditions of Carriage and fare rules, quoted verbatim with the clause reference and the date read
  • IATA Timatic and Timatic AutoCheck documentation, and its publisher and update chain
  • Carrier "Manage Booking" retrieve-booking lookup URLs, tested
  • GDS mechanics as documented by the GDS operators
  • Government carrier-liability instruments (the US fining regime, VWP carrier obligations, the UK charging regime)
  • ReservationPoints' own operational records
  • Dated traveller reports — only ever as evidence of experience, never as evidence of a rule

Geographic focus

Global for carriers. For country pages: the Americas and North American entry regimes — Argentina, Brazil, Canada, Colombia, Costa Rica, Mexico, Panama, Peru, United States. In those markets the onward-travel requirement is enforced by the carrier at check-in under fining and removal liability, rather than assembled into a consular file.

Articles from this desk

No articles yet.

Corrections

If something on a page from this desk is wrong, or a source has changed since the date we read it, tell us at contact us and we will check the source again.