Revenue grows and so do Air India's online booking woes

New Delhi: Decent growth in passenger numbers - and therefore yields (revenue per passenger) -brings with it its own set of problems. And Air India is just finding out the magnitude of these problems.

AI officials say they detected large-scale violations in the way the country’s top four travel portals are selling tickets of the airline.The most serious, officials say, is that some websites are selling tickets where cancellation attracts no charges - something that AI has not authorised, and which is hurting its bookings.

“We do not offer tickets with no cancellation charges. These travel portals are offering tickets without such charges - this not only violates our contract with them, it encourages passengers to make multiple bookings on airlines……we are fighting several such unethical practices in the industry,” an official said.

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[caption id=“attachment_283228” align=“alignleft” width=“380” caption=“The booking woes for AI come just when the airline has seen a decent growth in passenger revenues.Reuters”]  [/caption]

He also pointed out that this problem of tickets without cancellation charges has aggravated over the last two weeks and AI issued notices to the top four travel portals a week back. These websites should be correcting themselves over the next 72 hours.

The official also said that some portals began to aggressively advertise ‘opaque’ fares, saying the airline had authorised them when no such permission was granted. Already, travel portals such as makemytrip.com are facing the music for dabbling in opaque fares, with IndiGo pulling out all inventory from Makemytrip and Jet Airways curtailing the seats they sell through this website.

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Opaque fares hide the airline a passenger is booking online till he has finished paying for the ticket, and this practice has gained currency in the last few months after Kingfisher Airlines used this practice to sell cheap tickets.The AI official also said that travel portals are showing discounts on websites which have not been approved by the airline.

The booking woes for AI come just when the airline has seen a decent growth in passenger revenues. In the January-March quarter this year, AI’s yields (revenue per passenger) on international routes was up 18% year-on-year. Revenue was higher by Rs 450 crore on international operations and Rs 400 crore on domestic flights.

AI is expecting yields to grow 8-10% year-on-year this quarter, with 15-20% topline growth.