We first saw bar-coded boarding passes demonstrated at an IATA E-Ticket conference in 1995. A small company was trying to convince the world's airlines that they could save money and improve efficiencies by adopting technology from the supermarkets. Most airline people scoffed at the time. We had ATB2. Why would we ever change to such a cheap and nasty solution? Fifteen years on and we now understand just how short-sighted we were. Congratulations to the small business visionaries and the IATA bureaucrats who between them have pushed through a change that genuinely saves the industry billions of dollars and opens up new business processes that would have been unachievable using ATB2.