Imagine being able to choose your aircraft seat when you book your ticket on-line; only having to get to the airport an hour-and-a-half before an international flight; not having to queue to check-in; having an electronic luggage tag so your bag's whereabouts can be tracked; being able to waltz through immigration in moments by staring into a retina scanner; and, perhaps best of all, imagine paying lower air fares as well.

Sound too good to be true? Well it's what the International Air Transport Association (Iata) wants to see happening the next four or five years. Last November it launched a strategy called Simplifying the Business, which calls for a complete revamp of tickets, boarding, passes, check-ins and baggage handling.

And local travellers can take heart that Air New Zealand is among the airlines most energetically introducing those ideas.

Its group general manager airlines, Rob Fyfe, is enthusiastic about the way new technology is allowing him to streamline the travelling process and to reduce costs. "We are," he says, "very committed to the process."

Part one of Iata's masterplan is to eliminate paper tickets by 2007, a move expected to save airlines US$2.7 billion ($3.7 billion) a year, as well as making life easier for passengers.

At the moment that target seems a long way off - at present only 35 per cent of tickets worldwide are issued electronically - but the proportion has more than trebled in the past three years and the trend is accelerating.

New Zealanders have flocked to electronic tickets, attracted by the lower prices and the advantage of being able to book from home instead of having to visit a travel agent.

Already 95 per cent of Air New Zealand's domestic bookings are made electronically, and the airline encourages the use of electronic tickets on international flights where it is the sole carrier. It has just started negotiating with other airlines on inter-airline electronic ticketing, the first step being a deal with Air Canada.

"So," says Fyfe, "if you're doing a journey all the way with Air New Zealand and Air Canada you can have an electronic ticket all the way through."

That is likely to expand rapidly over the next few months. "We're committed within Star Alliance to having inter-airline electronic ticketing with all the alliance partners by the end of the year and that will cover the majority of our passengers," he says. "After that we'll just tick off the other airlines our passengers use in order of priority."

The enthusiasm for electronic tickets is at least partly because it is clumsy to get the financial information - especially the details about how the money from a journey involving more than one airline is to be shared - off the old paper coupons.