Manx Flyer

After the many recent discussions on here about the supposed worsening of the product (I mainly fly short haul in Y and long haul in CW for work and still find BA as good if not better than most airlines on my routes) I saw this article in the Economist and it will be interesting to see if any of the major airlines use the new technology to more more upmarket.

Economist Article

I suspect a lot of the discussions on here will be increasingly replicated by the 'normal world' - whereas today the information is hidden for people who do not fly a lot.

Personally I agree with the comments below the article - there is probably some scope in the Y sectors for a small premium for service, and this will help make the message clearer. I think this type of rating will struggle in the CW type environment where the cost of service will probably be much higher (or at least will be marketed as such!)

Does anyone agree?

Cheers

Manx Flyer

Lioneye

Thanks for posting that.

It's something we've been saying on here for a while - the race to the bottom on pricing and to hell with the service & comfort.

The sooner the passenger is able to fight back effectively by revealing the reality of the onboard experience the better. Only then will airlines strive to make the experience more bearable.

Search engines simply giving the cheapest price have influenced BA and others to decimate the service so some return of balance will be most welcome.

T8191

Without going into any detail, I found that routehappy.com they mentioned quite interesting. Whilst it may not be 100% accurate, or reflect personal preferences, it at least adds a further dimension to holiday route-planning without having to wade through the mysteries on Matrix!

Ldnn1

The most astonishing thing in that article are the statistics about how few people book online:

Who on earth are all these numpties (over 60% in Europe!) who aren't buying online?!

Surely there can't be that many FTers buying AA coded flights to HNL over the phone with BA to ensure max TPs.

Manx Flyer

Wonder if that is the corporate travel market? How much would that be? Can't be all of it, but might be another 30%? As you say, do the others use high street travel agents?

Cheers

Manx Flyer

FrancisA

Or Expedia etc? (over the phone for anything complex)

Ldnn1

Apparently easyJet sells 97% of its tickets online. Would be interesting to know the BA figures.

I imagine some corporate bookings are still done over the phone but surely most of that is now online too?

Raffles

No. Few corporate bookings are plain vanilla 'book the cheapest non-refundable'.

BA has multiple fare buckets in each class for a reason and you often end up needing a particular one given your position on cancelling etc. You may also book a return where each leg has different flexibility, eg the outbound can be fixed but the return must be flex or semi-flex. This is not easily done online.

710 77345

So if it is a 'no', what proportion do you think it is? A no doesn't pass the sniff test, corporate travel portals are perfectly able to show different carriers, options which are in and out of policy and also allow you to change the fare of the flights you've selected.

CrazyJ82

Might it depend on how one defines "online"? My corporate bookings are done through an internal website where I'm presented with a menu of approved carriers and can pick my flight times. So to me it feels like "online booking." But I recently discovered that there is a human intervention at some point before the ticket is issued, so that probably gets counted as an agency rather than online booking in the stats.

Fly Baby

Not surprised. I learned last Monday that a friend from Uni who is coming to stay with us in NL for a weekend used a HSTA to book her itinerary:- BRS to AMS. The world of air travel is a mystery to her and I’m pretty sure we underestimate how knowledgeable people are on FT compared with so many others.

Try it: Just ask friends or colleagues what type of aircraft they flew on for their last holiday and most of them say “an orange one?”

jelliott04

I'm a TA and try my darndest not to book domestic air at all and only sometimes do international air. I'll go so far as to send them a screen shot of what flights to book and they still want me to do it. So my limited experiences prove that you're right about most people not having the first clue on aircrafts and what metal they are actually flying etc.

There really are two prices, "cheap" and "least amount of agony".

J

T8191

Perhaps it's a side effect of being a "Silver Surfer", but we have the time to micro-manage details thanks to FT and assorted other websites and fora

Plunging into the unknown is for young people, and the careless!

Ldnn1

There's a big difference between not knowing about aircraft types, and not knowing about the internet.

None of my friends/acquaintances are on FT (so far as I know) but I have no doubt that every one of them would look up and book their own flights online.

The only exceptions would be for RTW/complicated multi-city itineraries, or to compare prices from e.g. Flight Centre against what they've already found online.

Corporate is obviously another matter and I guess it depends whether the booking agent system (my old firm used Chambers Travel IIRC) counts as an online booking or not in the stats.