AI to discuss air ticket pricing with travel portals

New Delhi: With trouble brewing between some major airlines and travel portals over issues concerning ticket pricing and revenue sharing, Air India has called all major online agencies to discuss how to overcome such problems, airline sources said today.

The national carrier would be holding separate meetings with representatives of these portals over the next few days to sort out a variety of problems relating to sharing of revenue and pricing of tickets, they said.

“We would want fairness, transparency and a non- discriminatory approach in our dealings with the portals. We should ensure that business is done with ethics and the passengers are not misled,” the sources said.

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[caption id=“attachment_281302” align=“alignleft” width=“385” caption=“Air India has called all major online agencies to discuss how to overcome ticketing problems.PTI”]  [/caption]

Late last month, aviation regulator DGCA had directed all airlines to stop participating in any ‘opaque fare’ scheme being offered by the online travel portals. ‘Opaque fares’ is a practice where a portal sells heavily discounted tickets but does not disclose the airline’s name until the payment is made by the customer.

Several airlines complained that through ‘opaque fares’, some portals were issuing low-priced tickets of Kingfisher Airlines under-cutting them, a charge denied by Vijay Mallya’s carrier.

Following this, no-frill airline IndiGo pulled out of the leading online travel portal MakeMyTrip (MMT) and Jet Airways drastically reduced its inventory on their site, alleging that MMT continued to offer “arbitrary and opaque fares” despite directives against such fares by the DGCA.

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But MMT maintained that the fares and inventory of various airlines on its website was “controlled by the airlines. All fares are displayed as per the guidelines received and approved by airlines including the special fares that has been approved by the participating airlines.”

Apart from ‘opaque fares’, industry sources pointed out that some portals were not charging any cancellation fee on some air tickets, which led to losses of airlines charging that fee.

Another issue which the airlines were worried about was that some portals were issuing tickets giving the registration number of other travel agencies rather than their own. A customer would think that the ticket was bought from the travel portal itself, whereas it was not, the sources said.

Industry sources pointed out that currently there were no rules guiding the business practices of the travel portals. So, the rules governing the global distribution system (GDS), which caters to international air ticket sales, were loosely applied.

But the industry sources also did not approve of the moves initiated by IndiGo and Jet Airways, saying withdrawal from one travel portal did not matter as such “malpractices” were being carried out by other portals also.

“Such a move also affects transparency as the passengers do not get to know the entire range of ticket prices offered by all major airlines,” the industry sources said.

PTI