SriLankan Airlines is on track to reach global e-ticketing targets this year, with 80 percent of its tickets issued worldwide now in an e-ticket format.

The country's national carrier, SriLankan Airlines has been driving the changeover to electronic ticketing since January 2006, a process that has begun paying dividends. From January to June this year the airline's overall e-ticketing penetration spiked from 30 percent to 80 percent with issue of nearly 72,000 e-tickets versus nearly 18,000 paper tickets in June. These sales are entirely through travel agents, though adding up sales from the airline's ticket offices and online portal could take penetration to over 90 percent.

"This is an outstanding achievement for SriLankan Airlines and we have made remarkable progress in spreading e-ticketing across our network in so short a time. There's no doubt that e-ticketing is helping passengers around the world in terms of convenience and the airline to increase productivity," Manoj Gunawardena, head of worldwide passenger sales at SriLankan Airlines said. "We have already achieved a high number of e-ticket sales in the airline's own reservations system and in global distribution systems. With the addition of more airline partners we believe that we will be able to reach the goal of achieving 100% e-ticketing by the end of 2007."

It took six months to put the necessary technology and technical expertise in place to enable travel agents and the airline's ticketing and reservation systems to process e-tickets.

SriLankan Airlines has also tied up with 40 interline e-ticketing airline partners to date, completing the projects in record time. A total of 50 interline agreements are likely to be finalised by year end, putting SriLankan in the top tier of airlines to do so.

SriLankan partnered with Emirates Airlines to implement e-ticketing, lowering costs resulting in substantial economies of scale. SriLankan Airlines flies to 51 destinations in 28 countries.