What is the purpose of check-in before flying? (2014)
&gt; When you buy a flight or a journey, you are actually buying a ticket. This used to be a paper ticket, but now it&#x27;s electronic. But the actual process is the same as before, it&#x27;s just an electronic implementation of the paper. The ticket is your proof to the airline that you paid an organisation it trusts for the flight. The airline will only distribute its unique ticket paper to travel agents it trusts.<p>Back a very long time ago, I worked for a company that had a lot of traveling employees.  We were our own travel agent and had on-site all of the things a retail travel agent (at the time) had.  As a junior sysadmin, I was responsible for the computer parts, specifically getting the ticket printing machine placed in a secure room--TWO keys and a reinforced door and door frame--and working with our telco vendor to get the dedicated circuit connected to the nearest Sabre Global Distribution System hub.<p>One day, the ticket printing machine experienced a fault and ran a whole stack of ticket paper through at high speed, shredding all of the blank ticket stock we had.  Though it didn&#x27;t look like it at the time, this wound up being an absolute nightmare.  We could only get a certain amount of ticket stock at a time (since there were few digital controls, if I took a blank ticket and typed my own details onto it, free flight!...until someone matched up the audit number).  We couldn&#x27;t just ring up our sponsoring corporate travel agency and ask for more ticket stock because they had the same limitations on themselves.<p>I spent <i>all weekend</i> picking all of the pieces out of the machine and taping them back together to get the audit numbers off of enough (I think 90%) of the destroyed ticket stock, along with pictures of the shredded pile and of the inside of and nearby the machine.  The pictures were developed at a K-Mart and the whole works sent off via FedEx first-AM overnight (the most expensive parcel I&#x27;d ever shipped, $135 at the time) to an address somewhere in Colorado.  Three hours after delivery, I had a phone call saying our request for replacement ticket stock was granted and they sent a stack of ticket stock via hand-delivered courier who I had to meet at the nearby airport.<p>Fortunately we didn&#x27;t need to issue any tickets for our employees to travel that weekend.