Advance bookings surge 30% on air fare cuts

New Delhi: Major Indian carriers have seen advance bookings on travel portals surge by 30 per cent since the fare cut announcements last week.
While portals such as makemytrip, cleartrip and ezeego have seen a rise of 30 per cent in advance booking in the first week of January, others such as yatra and travelocity, with a 10-15 per cent surge, are also expecting more bookings in the coming weeks.
“Domestic and international bookings have surged since Kingfisher, Air India and Jet Airways cut fares, and the low-cost carriers announced Rs 99 and Re 1 tickets for advance travel,” said Himanshu Singh, managing director, Travelocity.
The cleverly-introduced advanced booking fares have induced passengers to book tickets until as late as November.
For instance, Delhi-based makemytrip sold around 51,000 domestic airline tickets from January 1 to 5. Of that, around 82 per cent were booked for January, while the rest came for the five months from February till June. The portal has seen around 10 JetLite tickets getting booked for as late as November. Last year, 95 per cent of the bookings came for January and only 5 per cent were for the rest of the months. Also, there was no booking beyond March 2008.
Similarly, Mumbai-based travel portal cleartrip, which sold 70,000 tickets between December 26 and January 5, saw 70 per cent of the tickets being booked for the current month, and around 3-10 per cent for the months till April. cleartrip booked 5 Jet Airways and Kingfisher tickets each for November.
07/01/09 Anirban Chowdhury & Geetanjali Shukla/Business Standard

To Read the News in full at Source, Click the Headline

Categories: Indian Aviation- In General Jan 2009