Ticket Time Limit (ADTK) FAQ

To enforce travel agents and passengers to issue ticket after booking creation, Ticket Time Limit is published to all Cathay Pacific bookings. If travel agents fail to issue ticket for the customer before the ticket time limit date/time, Cathay Pacific segments will be cancelled to ensure better inventory control.

Frequently Asked Questions:

1. What is Ticket Time Limit?

   Ticketing time limit is deadlines for tickets to be issued. It is calculated from the PNR creation date and may be changed upon booking adjustment. The deadline date/time is sent in SSR ADTK message.

   Example of SSR ADTK message

   ADV TKT NBR TO CX BY 16MAY 0200 GMT OR SUBJECT TO CANCEL

2. Why Ticket Time Limit is important to both CX and the travel agents?

   It is important to reserve seat inventory for genuine demands. Otherwise, it will result in seats blockage which in turn adversely impact customers and travel agents to make reservation.

3. What will happen if the booking is not ticketed on the ticket deadline?

   The PNR will be cancelled automatically on the ADTK date/time if the booking is not ticketed.

4. How do I prevent auto cancellation?

   Check your GDS queue regularly and to avoid the risk of losing the seat, it is recommended travel agents to strictly follow the ticket deadline.

5. How do I know my customer’s booking is cancelled due to ticket deadline expired and what should I do?

   If a ticket number is not entered within the ticketing time limit, the booking will be auto cancelled and the flight sector/s changed to HX. An SSR message will generate advising

   Example of SSR message

   CANCELLED DUE TO EXPIRED TICKET TIME LIMIT

   If the ticketing time limit has expired and the flights are auto cancelled, you will need to create a new booking from current availability.

6. As travel agent, how can we achieve the requirement if the ADTK request to issue ticket immediately after booking is made?

   The same day ticketing requirement allows a few hours of ticketing after booking is made. As immediate ticketing is normally requested for booking creation close to departure, so it is reasonable that passengers to get ready and make their travel arrangement.

7. Why sometimes booking has a very tight ‘few hours’ ADTK which is different pattern than what I usually receive?

   In some critical situation e.g. COVID19, with limited flight schedule and capacity, some flights/period are required early ticketing in order to reserve seat for genuine demands and prevent blockseat.

8. For departure date that are further away from today, what are the benefits of earlier ticket time limit requirement?

   Tighten TTL requires passengers to secure their booking options earlier. It provides benefits to travel agents preventing passengers holding seats and shopping around. As it is a global trend for other carriers to have similar setting hence travel agents’ support on this is critically important.

9. The booking keeps on cancelling by ADTK deadline, what should we do?

   Please request customer to issue the ticket by the deadline in order CX to secure a confirmed seat for the customer.

10. Will there be any penalty fee it travel agents repeated rebooking after it is cancelled by deadline?

    Cancel and rebook the same seat/flight on a repeated basis is called ‘churning’ and is a kind of abusive behavior. CX reserves the right to impose penalty including but not limited to ADM against abusive travel agents, and/or delink the abusive travel agents’ inventory access.

    It is always recommended to avoid churning by early ticketing.

11. If the booking consists of both waitlist and confirm segments, how does the ticket time limit work?

    All confirmed segments are taken into consideration and the most restrictive ticket time limit rule applies.

12. If the ticket deadline falls in weekend, is it postponed to next working day?

    No. The ticket time limit is advanced to previous working day.

13. How about Online Travel Agent (OTA) bookings?

    The same set of TTL rules applied to both online and offline travel agents. Global Online Travel Agent already requires passengers to make timely decision during the booking process. For OTAs that allow passengers to hold bookings without ticketing, this new ticket deadline initiative can fulfil the objective to remove invalid bookings and avoid inventory wastage.