Unfriendly Skies Stolen Airline Tickets Ruin Travel Agencies

When George Hudson’s family-owned travel agency was robbed last year, he counted himself lucky because the thieves left behind cash and computers, taking only blank airline tickets.

Nine months later, that robbery put him out of business.

Hudson reported the theft to the police, the airlines and the FBI, but all the major carriers started billing him for stolen tickets they had accepted for travel. Within months, his bill had grown to about $1.5 million.

“I’m embarrassed,” said Hudson, whose agency is in suburban Elmwood Park. “It looks like we are criminals. We’ve been in business 30 years.”

Hudson got no help from his insurance company, which argued the thieves took only blank tickets that were worthless at the time of the theft.

Hudson’s experience is not an isolated case. During the first nine months of this year, 128 travel agents across the country reported ticket thefts to Airline Reporting Corp., an Arlington, Va., company that issues the blank tickets for 144 airlines.

An organized gang of about 50 people appears to be targeting Illinois, according to Gary Yallelus, a Miami detective who began investigating the theft ring after the 1994 arrest of a suspect.

Within hours of a theft, the tickets are sent to Los Angeles, where they are turned into official-looking tickets on computers and distributed on the black market in the United States and overseas - some to drug dealers, illegal immigrants and possible terrorists, Yallelus said.

“There is a real big safety issue,” he said. “A lot of people using them are using false identification. Airlines don’t know who is on their flights.”

Rep. Harris Fawell, R-Ill., has requested a congressional hearing on the possible threat to air safety. “I fly the skies an awful lot, and I would like to think that the person sitting next to me was a legitimate passenger,” he said.

This year, airlines have reported $3.1 million in losses from stolen tickets that later were accepted for travel.

Travel agents have had to eat millions more. Over a two-week period last year, 19 Chicago-area travel agencies were robbed. At least three now are out of business, said Barbara Pisa, a Naperville travel agent who has been working to get the airlines to screen for stolen tickets before accepting them for travel.

The sales agreements between airlines and travel agents specifically state that the agents are responsible for ensuring that blank tickets are secured.

But travel agents argue that the airlines could easily screen for stolen tickets before they allow passengers to board.

All blank tickets issued by ARC have control numbers on them. ARC circulates the numbers of all stolen tickets to participating airlines, but carriers rarely perform more than an occasional computer check when tickets are presented, ARC president James Manning said.

“The bottom line is they can’t check all those tickets,” he said. “There is a lot of pressure on those people to load those planes and get them out in a timely way.”

But even if the airlines checked only first- and business-class tickets, 90 percent of the people traveling on stolen tickets would be caught, Yallelus said.

Pisa said many stolen tickets look suspicious at just a glance. She said a Damascus, Ore., travel agency folded after its bill for stolen tickets approached $1 million. The total included one ticket worth $46,480.

American Airlines spokesman Bill Dreslin said the bill was actually for a series of tickets.

“And quite frankly, when someone is checking in at the gate, no one is looking to see how much you paid for a flight, so any amount could have gotten through,” he said. “It all goes back to the travel agencies.”