Every booking made in the platform starts life as an unticketed PNR: a real reservation in the airline’s own system, with real seats and a quoted price, and no money moved yet. The ticket is a second, separate act. The gap between the two is one of the most useful tools an agency has — and one of the easiest to misread.
A booking is not a ticket
A PNR, or Passenger Name Record, is the airline’s file for a journey: who is travelling, on which flights, in which booking class. A ticket is the document that makes that journey good for travel and moves the money. Airlines will create the first and wait a while for the second. That waiting period is the ticketing time limit, and it belongs to the airline and the fare — never to us.
Where the deadline appears
Every unticketed booking sits in your pending queue with its ticketing time limit shown as a countdown. That date and time come back from the airline with the booking; we display them, we do not set them and we cannot quietly extend them. When the countdown reaches zero and the booking has not been ticketed, the airline is free to cancel the reservation, and in most cases it does so automatically.
What the gap is worth
- Your client sees a confirmed itinerary — flight numbers, times, class — before they pay you.
- You can collect from your client, or clear funds, before you spend your own credit line.
- You can hold a specific seat and a specific fare while a visa, a group list or a corporate approval is being sorted out.
- If the trip falls through before you issue, nothing was bought, so there is nothing to refund and no penalty to argue about.
What the gap does not protect
Create your agency account
Register on the platform, we review and agree terms with you directly, then we activate your account.
Have these ready to speed things up:
- Commercial register or trade licence
- Owner or authorised-signatory ID
- Agency address, phone and email
The price. A fare that was quoted and not issued can reprice when you come back to it — a fare rule expires, a currency moves, or the booking class you are holding sells out underneath you. Some fares carry no gap at all: an instant-purchase fare has to be issued immediately or it cannot be held. The countdown tells you how long the airline will wait. It does not promise that the fare will still be there when you return.
“Confirmed” and “ticketed” are different words
A traveller who has been sent an itinerary will often say the trip is confirmed, and they are right: the airline has confirmed the seats. But until a ticket number exists against each passenger, there is nothing an airport can accept. So when a client forwards you an itinerary created somewhere else and asks you to take the trip over, the first question is always the same — is there a ticket number? A booking without one is a reservation on a countdown. If the answer is no and the deadline has not passed, that booking can be priced and picked up in the platform rather than rebuilt from scratch.
Working the queue
Treat the pending queue as a list with a clock on it, not as storage. A practical rhythm: book while the client is still on the phone, take payment or confirm cleared funds the same day, then issue comfortably before the deadline rather than on it. Issuing draws on your credit line and prices the itinerary against the fare that is live at that moment, so the last hour before a time limit is exactly where the unpleasant surprises live.
When the deadline is too short
Sometimes it simply is — a group waiting on visas, a corporate traveller waiting on an approval. Whether a time limit can be extended depends on the carrier, the fare and how full the flight is; some will, many will not. Raise it on the booking’s own chat with our operations desk before the deadline rather than after it. Once the airline has cancelled the PNR, the seats and the price go back to the market and the whole conversation starts again.
If any of the vocabulary here is new, the glossary defines it in both languages, and the FAQ covers how booking, issuing and settlement fit together.