EasyPNR Blog

What is a PNR?

EasyPNR Team -

PNR has several meanings, but we will focus just on that related to Tourism and Travel Industry.

PNR means Passenger Name Record, and it’s a very common acronym used in this industry. Basically, its information regarding passenger itineraries on a booking system.

PNR is commonly used in flights itineraries, basically, all global air companies use GDS systems, so PNR is on the vocabulary of professional of this field. PNR abbreviation can also be used to group information of hotels, trains, boats, and all of the travel industry that has some information about PAX and their itineraries.

In some countries, like India, it’s common to use PNR as the code number associated with a passenger train ticket. This can make some confusion, once GDS uses the RLOC acronym. Other information systems also adopted the RLOCs, following the GDS way of work.

What information is contained on a PNR?

A PNR usually can contain:

  • The Passengers (PAX);
  • The airlines (IATA or ICAO);
  • The flight number, that is globally standardized;
  • The cabin or fare class;
  • Departure Airport;
  • Arriving Airport;
  • Departure date and time;
  • Arriving date and time;

This is the most common information a PNR can contain, but, as it was mentioned before, PNR is not just about flights, it can also contain train station names, transfer from and to the airport, pick up car locations, hotel addresses, etc. The list is long and PNR has the flexibility to contain it all, and because of this, and information and patterns can vary a lot, following configurations and changes on systems that occurs over time, being necessary a good knowledge by the professionals of tourism industry, to interpret and handle different PNR formats form several GDS systems.

There are several GDS systems, the most used are Amadeus, Sabre and Travelport. All of them uses PNR.

How to convert or format a PNR?

It’s suspicious to say, we know, but, we strongly recommend to use EasyPNR for that. It's free, reliable, and can decode most of the information contained on a PNR. Moreover, you save time and avoid typing and interpreting mistakes.

What does EasyPNR do with PNR?

EasyPNR decodes/translates/formats PNR of several GDS systems for free. Officially supports Amadeus, Sabre and Travelport*.

*We already noticed that others GDS also works.