Booking Flight Tickets Online? Be Cautious!
With reviving economy, more and more people are opting for an air travel. Most of the airlines, bleeding hardly in economic crisis, have a reason to smile with lesser loss or marginal profits. Among all Indian airlines, Air India is still struggling for its survival with its cumulative loss of Rs8,461 crore in fiscal 2007, 2008 and 2009, and estimated loss of Rs5,400 crore in fiscal 2010. Mother of all failure, Isn’t it?
You could book a flight online with number of travel portals. Makemytrip.com, Yatra.com, Cleartrip.com are quite popular among the list. Basically, these portals aggregate results of all the airlines and help you to find out the best deal. Before booking for your next air travel, I want you to know the common trap of online booking. Just few days back, when I was planning to book the ticket from Hyderabad to Vadodara, I observed an opportunistic behavior of some of the sites, which could have cost me 2000 INR more than it actually costs.
If you are planning a journey well in advance then for the same flight you will find negligible price variation across all the portals. This observation has led me to the conclusion that ‘Price remains same across all the portal, all the time.’ But if it is your unplanned journey, say you want to book the ticket just few days before journey date, Be cautious!! You may find dramatic price difference for the same flight across different portals. Reason behind this opportunistic behavior might be,
- Generally, people become loyal to any single portal and they blindly trust them.
- Considering unplanned journey as a reason, one has a little time to crawl through many portals.
Please check below results (captured on 3:27PM, 26th July, 2010) for the connecting flight from Hyderabad to Vadodara on 2nd July. Where Makemytrip.com offers deal at 6325 INR compared to Yatra.com’s 4016 INR deal for the same flight. For further verification, I have checked fare for the same flight on official Indigo website (Goindigo.in) and it turns out as 4016 INR, same as Yatra.com. It seems like Makemytrip.com is little unfair here. For your kind information: Makemytrip.com with $400 million revenue in fiscal 2009, has more than 50% market share of online sales in Indian travel market.
GoosPoos Recommendation: Don’t blindly trust any portal! Make sure you find out the best air travel deal by querying all the portals. Worth every penny you spend!
Makemytrip.com result,
Yatra.com result,
Official Indigo Airline website (GoIndigo.com) result,
1 Comment
Sell Flights - JumpFlight
07.17.2010
Thanks for this interesting post about flight tickets. It’s always a pleasure to be on your site.
If you want to check out another webpage where you can find many very affordable second hand tickets from people who can’t attend their flights, visit http://www.jumpflight.com.
If you should need any further information on JumpFlight please drop me a line.
Best,
Linda
http://www.twitter.com/jumpflight
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07.01.2010
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