What is PNR , booking reference number in Travel industry most buzzy word

The travel industry is full of acronyms, but few are very important like Passenger Name Record, or PNR. In this article, we’ll look at exactly what a PNR is and the fundamental role it plays in the flight booking industry.

What is PNR

A Passenger Name Record (PNR) is a digital file that contains information about a passenger or group of passengers traveling together and their booking. For airlines, it serves as the official record of your booking and helps them share information if the trip involves different carriers (i.e. carriers with a codeshare or interline agreement).

When a PNR is created, it’s given a unique code called a record locator, a booking reference or simply a PNR number to identify and retrieve the file.

While originally created for the airline industry, PNR’s now contain complete trip information and can include hotels, rental cars, transfers, travel insurance, cruises and other information.

How PNR relates itinerary

This is where things begin to get a bit tricky! A travel itinerary is essentially a schedule of travel events — what destinations the traveler will visit, how long he/she will stay and the transportation that he/she will use to get there. In travel agent lingo, an itinerary is broken down into segments, with each portion of the journey — a flight, a hotel stay, etc. — as a different segment.

How a PNR relates to an itinerary (and its component segments) depends on a lot of factors, like the number of airlines involved, interline or codeshare agreements and the system on which the booking was made. For example, it’s possible to have the same PNR for different flights if a round-trip or connecting flight is booked with the same airline. If the connecting flight involves two airlines that don’t have an agreement, there may be different PNRs for each segment of the trip.