I still find it strange you can manage a booking with just a reference and name. About ~5 years ago someone I follow on twitter posted their boarding pass and I replied to them with a screen shot asking if I should cancel the booking. They removed their post and I removed mine. But all it took was the reference on the boarding pass and their last name...
What I've gathered left and right wrt the airline industry is that it was one of the earliest industries that went digital, and / but they have a lot of legacy going on.
I mean in this particular case, they could have Abbott create an account on their website first, but then, someone else booked the ticket for him so that makes things more complicated (because they don't have an e-mail address), and then there's tickets being booked all over the world, and then loads of people don't have computers or e-mail.
The amount of pain still caused by things like somebody back in the sixties deciding that two characters is plenty to encode every single airline ever is still felt to this day. Witness the majesty of the "controlled duplicate": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airline_codes
I understand why... A lot of business travelers have a third party book their flights, so there isn't always a username/password. Airlines and travel agencies don't make it clear that it's sensitive information though.
