DGCA starts work on new regulation to act against practice of fictitious bookings in airlines

Mumbai: The Ministry of Civil Aviation (MoCA) had found out that that travel agents and portals, who do bulk purchase of tickets in advance from carriers are primarily responsible for this rise in airfares, during the strikes by airline pilots. To discuss the issue in detail MoCA had also called a high-level meeting of all airlines. In a first initiative of its kind, the Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA) has started work on a new regulation to curb this malpractice. The DGCA is learnt to be doing a detailed study of the entire ticketing process of airlines. It is examining how agents and portals pick up tickets through advance purchase and then price them for sale.
According to a report in the Times of India, a senior official from DGCA said, ‘‘We found that some big agents and portals do huge amount of ghost booking. For instance, they pick up one lakh tickets and do ghost booking for as many as 80,000 tickets. Due to this, price of remaining tickets rise. Once a high level of price is reached and tickets are sold, seats earlier blocked by ghost booking are gradually sold at premium rates. In the aviation industry, ticket prices keep rising as seats get sold. So when a flight opens for ticket sales, the first few seats go at the lowest price. Then fares keep rising as the number of available seats reduces.”
The official added that DGCA is working on a new regulation, possibly the first of its kind, to target the Global Distribution Systems (GDS) on which tickets are sold.
11/12/09 TravelBizMonitor

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Categories: Indian Aviation- In General Dec 2009