Airline Policy Requires Passengers to Pay a Price for Losing Their Ticket : Rules: Standard practice may surprise travelers, who are usually charged a processing fee of $50 and must buy a replacement seat at the best available rate.

If you lose an airline ticket, it’s almost always going to cost you something.

A colleague discovered this the hard way recently. He showed up at the boarding gate of the Providence, R.I., airport and suddenly found that he had somehow misplaced the boarding pass given him at check-in just 45 minutes earlier. He thought the airline should immediately issue him a replacement, at no extra charge. Not so, he learned.

Like countless travelers before him, he was confronted by an industry-wide airline policy that both flabbergasted and angered him. In his case, it also cost him 50 bucks and a temporary outlay of $160 more.

With a few variations, U.S. airlines have established similar procedures for dealing with passengers who have lost tickets, misplaced them or believe they have been stolen. All of the major airlines contacted--American, Continental, Delta, Northwest, Pan Am, TWA, United and USAir--charge a processing fee, and it is rarely waived. For most carriers, the fee is $50. Pan Am raised its fee to $70 on July 1, according to spokeswoman Elizabeth Hlinko.

But it isn’t the fee alone that upsets my colleague and other travelers.

If you don’t have your ticket and you still want to fly, airline policy almost always requires that you purchase a new ticket. Usually, you must pay the best fare available on the day you are requesting the replacement. This can set tempers flaring, and for very good reason.

Earlier this year, most carriers offered bargain round-trip fares for travel during summer months, including a fare of about $325 for flights between Washington and San Francisco. If you were to lose that discounted ticket on the way to the airport today, you might be charged as much as $1,136 for a replacement--the lowest no-advance-purchase fare currently being quoted by United.

This is not an iron-fast rule, and American Airlines, which earlier this year changed its lost-ticket policy, is an exception. At American, the cost of a replacement ticket now is the same as the fare originally paid, according to Rosmond Johnson, an analyst in the airline’s Ticketing and Terminal Services Department. If you paid $325 for a nonrefundable fare, that’s all the replacement will cost you.

In a sense, however, the money paid for a replacement ticket is only on deposit with the carrier. If, after a specified time--generally 30 to 120 days, depending on the airline--your lost or stolen ticket has not been used, then you are refunded the cost of the new ticket, less the $50 or $70 processing fee.

But--and this is where you could lose big--if someone does manage to use or cash in your ticket, then you probably won’t get any refund at all. To protect against this, report a loss to the airline immediately.

If your budget is tight, paying up front for a replacement ticket could put you in a quandary. Do you have the cash or an unused credit line of $1,136 to pay for the new ticket to San Francisco? And what if somebody does find a way to use your missing ticket, and you get no refund? Can you really afford the trip?

If you are abroad, have lost a ticket and have neither cash nor a credit card to buy a replacement, you could be stranded until funds are forwarded from home.

To get a refund for a lost ticket or replacement, you must fill out a lost-ticket form, available at airport and downtown ticket counters.

Confronted with the industry’s lost-ticket policies, my colleague didn’t like them but had no reasonable alternative if he wanted to fly home on his scheduled flight. There may be a better way to resolve lost-ticket problems, but the airlines haven’t adopted them yet. Protesting got my colleague nowhere.

But he remained puzzled about why, in this computer age, an airline couldn’t somehow note his predicament in the same computer entry where it has filed his reservation record. As he says, all the airline had to do “was check my flight data in the computer, make sure I was me, put a black mark in the computer to be sure no one else later traded in my lost ticket, punch up a reissue and send me merrily on my way.”

As the airlines explain it, however, the process isn’t quite so simple. Their computers aren’t all that sophisticated, and they haven’t been programmed to keep up-to-the-minute track of what is happening to every ticket. At American and Continental, reports of lost or found tickets are entered on a separate data base, and not on the passenger’s record. Continental check-in clerks are expected to read the list each morning, says spokeswoman Peggy Mahoney, but they may not remember every name.

In some cases, American may reissue a ticket, charging only the $50 processing fee, if you have lost only the return portion while away from home. It depends, says Johnson, on whether the carrier can quickly verify that it issued the original ticket to you. TWA may be able to reissue a ticket if you have the ticket number, according to spokesman Jim Faulkner.

George Albert Brown, author of “The Airline Passenger’s Guerrilla Handbook,” suggests photocopying your ticket as a way of keeping a record of the serial number. It could speed up the lost-ticket refunding process.

The 30- to 120-day waiting period is imposed, says Johnson, to give the carrier time to determine if your lost ticket was improperly used and whether you are entitled to a refund. If you find your ticket, this should speed up the refund.

The processing fee is charged to cover the airline’s cost of completing the necessary research. Delta waives the fee if you find your ticket and return it within 30 days of filing a lost-ticket application, according to spokesman Neil Monroe.

At least one aspect of the industry’s lost-ticket policy is designed to protect the paying passengers, Johnson says. If you bought your ticket with a credit card--the safest practice--no one can turn it in for a cash refund. A refund can be credited only to your charge account.

An airline ticket should be treated as cash, warns Chris Witkowski, director of the Aviation Consumer Action Project. The Washington-based consumer group publishes a 22-page pamphlet called “Facts and Advice for Airline Passengers.”

“One thousand dollars’ worth of airline tickets,” says Witkowski, “is like carrying $1,000 in cash.”

If you lose a ticket, should you expect the airline to suffer for what may be your carelessness? “If someone steals $100 from you,” says USAir spokeswoman Nancy Vaughan, “you can’t get it back from the bank that gave it to you.”

For a copy of “Facts and Advice for Airline Passengers,” send $2 to Aviation Consumer Action Project, P.O. Box 19029, Washington, D.C. 20036.