Booking air tickets, or that matter, any tickets for transportation purposes, has undergone a paradigm change. If a marketing student was to carry out an exhaustive study of changing customer behavior, then the air ticketing business can provide one of the best models. It can be said without much ado that travel industry was one of the first to have adopted the ecommerce technologies, enabling people to book tickets online.
Before this, air tickets used to be booked only by way of meeting agents face-to-face or on phone. It is a fact that airtickets are still booked face-to-face, but their proportionate numbers are rather insignificant. The only major purpose for which the face-to-face interaction is required is for travel planning or answering some queries or sorting out some issues. This change in behavior has prompted ticket booking companies to recalibrate their marketing efforts to focus on online.
The reason why the face-to-face interactions are not required are the following:
a) Online medium has given flexibility of choosing flights. The flight choices are many.
b) Online medium also gives a chance to look at prevailing fares and many deals. This goes a long way to deliver cheap air tickets.
c) Online medium allows visiting many websites at a time to find the best deals and fares.
This is not possible in personal interactions as a lot of time is required to visit multiple agencies or airlines for seeking deals.
d) Booking can be done conveniently online by providing personal details and proceeding to make payment. There is no limit to the number of bookings that can be done at a particular time. However, the front offices of the agencies or airlines are limited in the scope of operations by the number of people employed for ticketing in the front office.
e) The information about various things associated with air travel can also be looked into. This information can be about the identification documents, special assistance documents, baggage policies, refunds and cancellations policies and others. This information, if obtained through an agent, might be mistaken.
Ease of online ticket booking process, ease of seeking information, performing research for cheap air tickets and a number of other conveniences make the online medium the most preferred way of ticket reservations.
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