E-Ticket Number Explained: Where to Find It and What It Means

If the booking reference identifies your reservation, the e-ticket number identifies your ticket — the paid contract of carriage. They are different objects, and only one of them means you have bought something.

The structure

An e-ticket number is 13 digits, conventionally written in two parts:

125 - 2412345678
 │        │
 │        └── serial number, plus a check digit
 └── airline accounting code (3 digits)

The first three digits are the airline’s numeric accounting code, assigned by IATA. It identifies the carrier whose ticket stock was used — which is not always the airline you fly. On an interline journey the ticket is issued on one carrier’s stock and honoured by others.

A few you will see often:

Code	Airline
001	American Airlines
006	Delta Air Lines
016	United Airlines
057	Air France
074	KLM
105	Air Canada
125	British Airways
176	Emirates
157	Qatar Airways
618	Singapore Airlines
235	Turkish Airlines

The remaining ten digits are the serial, ending in a check digit. Some documents show the number with a hyphen after the prefix; some do not. Some add a further suffix for individual coupons — one per flight segment — which is how a partially flown ticket is tracked.

The airline code lookup covers the two-letter IATA and three-letter ICAO codes, which are separate identifiers from this numeric one.

Where to find it

On the itinerary receipt emailed after purchase, usually labelled “Ticket number”, “E-ticket number” or “Document number”
In the airline’s app or Manage Booking page, often under the passenger’s name
On a boarding pass, sometimes in small print
From the travel agent who issued it, if booked indirectly

If you cannot find one anywhere, that is informative: the ticket may not have been issued, and you may be holding a reservation rather than a ticket. See flight reservation vs ticket.

What it is used for

Refunds and reissues. A refund is processed against the ticket number, not the booking reference. If you are chasing money, this is the number to quote.

Involuntary rerouting. When a flight is cancelled and another airline takes you instead, the ticket is endorsed over. The receiving airline works from the ticket number.

Proving the fare paid. For expense claims and corporate travel reporting.

Verification. An airline or, in some processes, a consulate can check a ticket number against the issuing system to confirm the ticket exists and is unused.

That last use is why the field appears on documents at all — and why it is meaningless on a sample.

Why a sample itinerary has no ticket number

The generator on this site prints SAMPLE — NOT ISSUED. The reasoning is identical to the booking reference, with one addition: e-ticket numbers are structured. They start with a real airline’s real accounting code and end in a check digit computed from the rest.

Producing a plausible one means borrowing a specific airline’s identifying prefix and computing a valid check digit — that is, manufacturing something designed to survive a first-pass validation against a real carrier’s identity. There is no version of that which is a planning aid.

A blank field, by contrast, costs a traveller nothing. If you are laying out a trip, you were never going to need a ticket number for it.

The check digit, briefly

The final digit is a modulus-7 check: the first twelve digits, read as an integer, divided by seven, with the remainder as the check digit. It exists to catch transcription errors when numbers were read over the phone, and it is why a mistyped ticket number is usually rejected immediately rather than returning someone else’s ticket.

It is worth knowing only because it explains why invented numbers tend to fail instantly.