05 APR 2018: American Airlines once had 120 of them in the USA alone – they now have four. Just as retail malls are falling fast all over the western world – victims to online-shopping – so too airline CTO’s have, in all but a few places, become a distant memory.

In fact the chances are pretty good that a number of people reading this will not even know what the letters CTO stand (stood) for. Well, the airline ‘City Ticket Office’ – usually a very understated descriptor – used to be a standard feature of just about every major city and frequently in some very swanky locations: For the longest time it was not unusual for some of the world’s ritziest, Upper 5th Avenue retailers, to have humble airlines like SAS, United, VARIG and Air France for neighbours.

Take San Francisco’s Union Square which, once upon a time, featured a veritable gaggle of airline ticket offices: Qantas was on the north side, United was on the northwest corner, American and British Airways were across the street, Western Airlines was on the south side while Pan Am, Swissair and a few others dotted the east side of the square. All are gone now – some in more ways than one!

As was addressed in this column a few weeks ago, the demise of the paper ticket is just the tip of the iceberg for technology-driven change in the airline industry. In their heyday however, the CTO was much more than a place to purchase tickets or amend reservations.

Like American Express and Thomas Cook offices when travellers cheques (another techno victim) were de rigueur, so too flag carriers’ CTO’s served as virtual mini-embassies for travellers in foreign lands. Americans in Paris – like Gene Kelly and Leslie Caron – were likely to say, “I’ll meet you at the TWA office on the Champs-Élysées.” They were comfort centres for homesick backpackers. Not that they distributed so much as a cup of coffee but they were just momentary islands of familiarity in alien city centers.

There are still the odd hangers on. American Airlines for instance has a CTO of sorts at 360 Lexington Avenue in Manhattan but it is a far cry from the grandiose showplaces that once existed. In this case they share the facility with an ‘It’s Easy Service Center’ where one can get passport pictures and other travel related stuff. For some peculiar reason AA also has one in a strip mall in Fort Lauderdale – maybe, like the WW2 Japanese soldier who hid in the jungle until 1974, the airline has just forgotten it’s there.  Shh – mum’s the word!

Air Canada still has a few remaining CTO’s in places such as Beijing, Buenos Aires, San Juan Costa Rica and Christchurch Barbados, although the chances are that they will be staffed by GSA’s rather than airline personnel. Remember those?  Once a ubiquitous feature of the industry, ‘General Sales Agents’ still exist but in the main are yet another casualty of the Internet.

My most amusing memory of CTO’s was with Laker Airways.  In early 1980 we were looking to open a downtown Miami ticket office and the real estate agent showing us around was quite excited about a space that had opened up, “right next to another non-competing airline.”

As you looked at it, the neighboring carrier, LACSA, was to the right of the spot we were being shown and there was apparently another space about to become available to the right of them. I asked if it had a tenant lined up and was told, “Yes, in fact another airline is looking at it.”

We never did rent the space, perhaps because I was concerned that the “other airline” might turn out to be the Polish carrier LOT, in which case the three storefronts would have read ‘LAKER LACSA LOT’ – not exactly the kind of message we wanted to put out there. Instead we rented a cute little office in Coral Gables, a location where, oddly enough, American Airlines still has a CTO.

One strange counterpoint to the disappearing CTO is what has been happening in the banking business.

While one might reasonably have expected that the ATM would have done to the need for bricks and mortar banks what the Internet did to CTO’s but, au contraire, the number of neighbourhood banks has continued to grow. In my little Connecticut town where there was once a gas station, there is now a sparkling new TD Bank. Why? I have no idea and whenever I’ve looked in there the place looks remarkably devoid of customers – kind of like I remember most CTO’s in their latter days.