Word: travel
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...stolen airline tickets. According to the INS, stolen tickets are part of a package deal, including phony IDs and Social Security cards, that smugglers provide to their clients. And for one person, Barbara Pisa, that news was vindication of sorts. For three years, ever since her Classic Travel Agency in Naperville, Ill., was one of 28 agencies in the suburbs west of Chicago hit by what police describe as a Colombian burglary ring, Pisa has waged a one-woman crusade to focus attention on what she and others say is a serious public-safety issue that the airlines have ignored...
...Travel agents are eager to get federal agents involved because once a ticket is used, the carrier can demand payment from the agency, even for stolen tickets. The agents say the airlines could thwart these crimes by using scanners capable of detecting tickets that have been reported stolen. Such technology would have enabled Hawaiian Airlines, for example, to intercept two passengers who flew from Honolulu to Maui last year with stolen first-class tickets on a plane that had no first-class section...
Liability for stolen tickets is potentially fatal to travel agencies, which have already seen their commission payments cut by the airlines at the same time that the agencies' business is being eroded by customers using the Internet. "We don't have that kind of money. We're just going to go out of business," says Pisa, who got a letter from American Airlines demanding $16,000 for stolen tickets written on her ticket stock. The airline later relented because Pisa had followed recommended security guidelines. But Georgette Bouland-Anthe, a travel agent in Libertyville, Ill., who lost 6,000 blank...
...arrived just about the time the INS was arresting those illegals trying to fly out of Phoenix. Pisa's hope is that a Government Accounting Office report due out in June will recommend that the airlines be forced to scan tickets, thereby rendering stolen ticket stock worthless. For some travel agents, that will be a little too late...
...show, produced in partnership with American Century Investments, will travel to the Newseum in New York City (June through September); the Reagan Federal Building in Washington (October through December); the Bush Library in College Station, Texas (April through June 2000); the Johnson Library in Austin, Texas (July through September 2000); and the Reagan Library in Simi Valley, Calif. (October through December 2000). Starting next week, you can visit parts of it on the Web at www.presidentsonline.com...