Travel portals keep airfares low

New Delhi: This season, even as airlines hike fares and go stingy on discounts, customers are gaining from the various offers given by travel portals.
For instance, Cleartrip had recently offered 50 per cent discount on all Go Air tickets for flights between midnight and noon. This offer had resulted in considerable increase of Go Air's recently-started night flight tickets.
Others like Yatra are giving away several cashback offers through tie-ups with banks through which a customer gets substantial discount on fares.
According to experts, India is the only country where travel portals are allowed to give discounts even more than what airlines are themselves willing to offer. The advantage for airlines is that the bulk of most of these discounts is funded by the travel portals themselves or by the banks they tie-up with for the offers.
Though the airline funds only part of the discounts it gets the full revenue for the ticket. For instance, even if a portal sells a Rs 5,000-ticket at Rs 4,500, the airline still gets Rs 5,000 as revenues for the ticket.
These offers are more valuable for the low-cost carriers because a major bulk of their ticket sales comes from travel portals also known as online travel agents (OTA).
26/12/07 Anirban Chowdhury/Business Standard

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Categories: General Aviation Dec 2007