Jet2.com Hits Million-Mark

September 10, 2004

“Throughout the booking and planning of this trip Jet2.com has been superb and their group booking service is second to none.” Louis Pickersgill Millionth Passenger jet2.com

Low cost airline welcomes on board passenger
number 1,000,000

Jet2.com, the North’s low cost airline, passed a major milestone yesterday as it welcomed on board its one-millionth passenger. A group booking of 40 people to Venice saw the airline burst past the magic number, only 18 months after its first flight took off.

Managing director of Leeds-based business Ravenheat, Louis Pickersgill, was officially named passenger number one million as he checked in for the flight. The firm, which is one of the European market leaders in Combination Central Heating Boilers, was flying out clients and customers to inspect its Verona-based factory on a three-day trip.

Mr Pickersgill will now receive two return tickets to a Jet2.com destination of his choice. He said he was shocked and delighted to be the one-millionth passenger:

“It’s a terrific surprise. I’ve flown with Jet2.com a number of times before personally, but this is the first time Ravenheat has taken so many clients and customers to see the factory.

“Throughout the booking and planning of this trip Jet2.com has been superb and their group booking service is second to none. Being named the millionth passenger is just the icing on the cake of what we know will be a very successful trip.”

Philip Meeson, boss of Jet2.com, said:

“This is a wonderful achievement for Jet2.com and I’d like to thank everyone for the hard work that has contributed to our success. Our staff put in every effort to ensure the best possible service for our passengers and that’s why they come back time and time again.

“The one millionth passenger is truly a fantastic milestone, and it’s great to be celebrating that with a successful local business. An increasing number of businesses are making group bookings like this and I’m sure Ravenheat and its customers will enjoy our quality service.

“Now we’ll look forward to taking care of the next million passengers that fly with Jet2.com.”

Source: Dart Group PLC

Air Southwest Reports Boom in Website Traffic

August 3, 2004

“Our website is at the cutting edge in the industry and allows us to reduce costs and pass those benefits on to customers in the form of low fares.” Mike Coombes General Manager Commercial Air Southwest

Air Southwest, the low fares regional airline, is reporting a huge increase in the number of visitors to its website with 90,000 people a month — or 3,000 every day — logging on to www.airsouthwest.com.

The number of visitors has more than doubled in the last six months and is being attributed to Air Southwest’s growing popularity and the fact that www.airsouthwest.com offers an increasing range of on-line travel services and information.

Mike Coombes, general manager commercial at Air Southwest, said: “Internet marketing has revolutionised air travel. Our website is at the cutting edge in the industry and allows us to reduce costs and pass those benefits on to customers in the form of low fares.

“90% of our sales come through the site and in recent months we’ve been adding new online services to offer visitors a complete travel package.

“We’ve also included a new section called Travel Southwest which contains useful links for destinations we serve, including Devon, Cornwall, Bristol, Jersey and Manchester, so the website is a real shop window for visitors wanting to explore these areas.”

Visitors to www.airsouthwest.com can also subscribe to an email newsletter called e-Southwest which includes news and information on the latest offers from Air Southwest and its travel partners. First launched in January, e-Southwest now has some 7,500 subscribers.

Air Southwest recently carried its 100,000th passenger and to date has sold in excess of 140,000 tickets since its launch last October.

Source: Air Southwest, On-line boom.

Fare Scanners and “Compare Fare” Sites:

Direct Distribution Going Wrong?
June 22, 2004

AirKiosk system management software includes somewhat intelligent programs to monitor visits and activity levels on our customers’ Web Booking pages.

This software tells us a high percentage of Internet traffic on some customer sites can come from a small number of Internet addresses doing nothing but displaying flights and fares for a rapid succession of destinations and dates.

These are not people, these are “people emulators” and “screen scrapers,” programs which mimic human searches to gain access to airline information. These “visitors” have no intention of ever making a booking.

In one case we recorded 14,000 page invocations (flight searches) in one hour from one of these programs. Needless to say, we block access to our servers from Internet addresses producing this type of activity.

Internet pages are designed for human use. Although Internet professionals recognize robotic activity as “server attacks” or “port jamming,” we have actually received lengthy complaints* from blocked parties!

The common argument from scanners is they are doing our customers a “favor” by gathering fare data and displaying it on alternate websites for, to quote one, “exceptional exposure, at no cost to themselves.”

* Complaints are forwarded to the relevant airline.

The High Cost of “Favors”
“Exceptional exposure” typically means inclusion in websites which compare the fare data of multiple airlines on competitive routes. One site argued the “benefit” is that travelers can go to one place to compare the fares of “all” Low Cost Carriers before making a decision, even though this fare information is not realtime, and therefore not reliable.

So, what does this cost an airline?

• Robotic web scanners rob your real customers of the web resources (server computing cycles and network throughput) provided to serve them. In some situations (for example numerous “screen scrapers” during busy hours), these programs could bring the operation of your website to a temporary standstill or complete halt.
• Your data may be used in ways you are not even aware of. Robotic scanners do not identify themselves; they can be run by any company trying to gather your fares information for sale to your competitors.
• Even with several scans a day, “compare fare” sites cannot have accurate fare or availability information.
• You lose brand control. You do not control the appearance of your brand or positioning relative to other airlines on alternate sites.
• You risk customer loyalty. Your customers may become loyal to the alternate site, not to visiting you.
• Your marketing message is weakened. Your flights become one of many promotions by a third party, and availability of your best fares may be misrepresented. Your promotional fares, designed to appear only on certain dates or only to certain visitors, will be missed altogether.
• You lose access to your market data. Customer access logs are in the hands of the alternate site owner. This is similar to the GDS’ MIDT appropriation of vendor data.

And, like booking engines run off of GDS databases (Travelocity, Expedia, Orbitz, Opodo), “compare fare” sites can damage the customer relationship by frustrating buyers who find, late in their attempts to actually book, that a low fare is really not available. GDS-based fares display relies on a single fares data repository. So, whether a “compare fare” site is running the ITA method of low fare search or some other homegrown algorithm, realtime fare changes will be ignored.

A Scary Prospect
Third parties — whether Orbitz or “Joe’s Fares” — taking travel vendor data and deciding how it will be presented to customers should be a familiarand scary proposition.

We are on the verge of the creation of Internet GDS companies, mimicking the old concept of a central data repository.

We do not need to look very far back to remember the time when the legacy GDS companies were the only “honest” brokers of the Travel Industry. Of course, it took years of effort and legislation to keep these companies “honest,” and still they found ways to run an exclusive club, preventing “undesirable” market entrants from competing with their “preferred” travel vendors, all while continuously increasing their fees.

It took guts for companies such as Southwest Airlines and EasyJet to declare that the GDSs are undesirable. They, and the near-miraculous development of Internet commerce, made GDS bypass a plausible solution. Today the use of the Internet to bypass GDS channels offers total operational cost savings of 18% to 25% to airlines. This savings could certainly help a number of carriers steer clear of Chapter 11.

The interests of both sides, the vendor and the customer, are best served when they know each other. It took Sutra the better part of a decade to build the AirKiosk system, a distribution solution designed to restore travel vendors’ direct relationships with both consumers and travel professionals.

If airlines allow alternate Internet sites to build a position as “Fare Consolidators,” they will lose a tremendous opportunity to both develop their direct vendor-customer relationship and to break away from intermediaries, which were the force behind the uncontrolled rise of distribution costs in the Travel Industry.

• 
  Source: Southwest Airlines

Southwest Airlines went as far as suing the operators of Orbitz to prevent their flights from appearing on that “compare fare” Internet booking site.

Controlled Data Availability
There are ways for travel vendors to connect to desirable websites in a way which the vendor controls.

• If the site is engaged in interactive sell, the preferred method would be XML, meaning that a special user name and password would be allocated to such a site, and their activities will be properly tracked.
• If fares need to be displayed just as a reference to support the primary content of the site, the fares may be periodically downloaded via a flat file, and must be displayed with a message clarifying the age and nature of the displayed information.

These methods of connection are available with the AirKiosk system.

When it comes to direct customer relationships, of course, there is no substitute for an airline’s own vigorous promotion of its website and direct agent channel.

Protect Your Site and Data from Illegal Scanning
Programmatic access to AirKiosk Web Booking pages is prohibited, and we take every reasonable measure we can to stop it.

It is the responsibility of our customers to clearly display a message on their websites that this is not allowed. Good examples of Website Use Terms and Conditions covering information theft and website abuse can be found on the sites of the pioneers of the GDS-breakaway movement, EasyJet and Southwest Airlines.

Source: www.easyjet.com

Source: www.southwest.com

The above are excerpts only. To see full Terms and Conditions, please visit the source websites.

Snowflake Booking Site Wins!

November 25, 2003

Snowflake airlines (www.flysnowflake.com) has received high praise when compared to other airline sites on the Swedish market.

In a recent survey, customers have praised www.flysnowflake.com as one of the most intuitive and user-friendly sites.

Topping the list of intuitive features is a brilliant booking interface where passengers have the ability to choose the month of travel, instead of the specific date, and then easily pick the lowest fare from a menu of options. In addition, www.flysnowflake.com excelled in tests measuring speed and ease of use from start to booking confirmation.

Snowflake airlines utilize the AirKiosk System, a technology developed by Sutra, Inc. Both companies are dedicated to providing the easiest and most effective low-cost solution for purchasing airfare online.

“The results of the poll and customer responses have been overwhelmingly positive,” stated Novak Niketic, principal developer of the AirKiosk system. “We continue to develop systems designed to make online airfare both convenient and simple for our customers.”

What You Didn’t Know About Low Fare Finders…

What You Didn’t Know About Low Fare Finders…

“Your low fare finder is the best initiative provided by any low cost airline. No doubt others will now follow your excellent example.”

- April 2003, www.jet2.com customer comment

The AirKiosk system Low Fare Finder has become a benchmark for the treatment of consumers by airlines, GDSs and online travel sites. The AirKiosk system Low Fare Finder is fast, accurate, and presented to consumers in a user friendly calendar format.

First introduced by jet2.com in April 2003, it received high praise from visitors to the UK airline’s site [click here to read jet2.com visitor comments]. SAS Snowflake, which implemented the AirKiosk system Low Fare Finder as the first step in its online booking process [www.flysnowflake.com], was selected by Internet travel shoppers, in a survey by Aftonbladet travel magazine [www.aftonbladet.se], as the best site (for speed, number of clicks, ease of use) compared to the sites of Ryan Air, Lufthansa, KLM and others.

Others Are Trying to Follow
Understanding that online travel shoppers prefer simple and quick access to the best fares available to any destination, many websites have started to offer a similar type of calendar-format fare display. For many unsuspecting online shoppers there is no immediately discernable difference between the Low Fare Finder on AirKiosk system-powered websites and on other sites. But the difference is big!

The Airkiosk system Low Fare Finder displays the lowest fare for a selected destination and month(s) based on realtime seat availability for the desired number of travelers. Once a customer has selected the lowest fare for both ways in a journey, she can immediately book seats at those fares. There are not the frequent surprises, disappointments or silly messages found on other sites, such as:

“This destination is very popular, and the last seat in the offered fare has JUST been sold.”

“The word got out, so we can show you NOTHING.”

The problem is that most online travel sites are not able to accurately display the lowest available fare.

Why Not?
Most online travel sites are connected to one of the four major GDSs (Global Distribution Systems), Sabre, Worldspan, Galileo and Amadeus. The GDSs are descended from the old concept of one central data repository holding the information of all airlines. The information available in the GDS systems is maintained (updated) by airlines, at a frequency primarily determined by the size and power of each participating airline.

The updating of flight and fare availability is a cumbersome process and requires the involvement of other companies besides the GDSs and airlines. And within the GDS network, not all airlines are equal. There are at least three tiers of airlines: First are airlines hosted in the same data center as the GDS database. These airlines have the greatest advantages of GDS distribution and the fastest ability to update their information. Second, there are airlines not hosted by the GDS companies but important enough to be given a realtime link to the GDS, providing better accuracy in flight and fare availability information. At the bottom are other airlines. They are provided a slower store-and-forward method of communicating the seats and fares they really have available, versus the seats and fares displayed in the GDS systems.

When a website’s online booking is powered by one of the GDSs, it is has some challenges trying to respond to a low-fare search:

• size of the fares database; too big to be searched in realtime
• accuracy of the fares database; latency time between the moment an airline changes fares and the moment the fares database is updated.
• accuracy of seat availability:
  • first-tier airlines are best equipped to display last-seat availability, but care is taken not to kill the performance of the GDS legacy mainframe systems, which were not built for Internet traffic volumes
  • second-tier airlines could theoretically display realtime seat availability, but their systems are even smaller than the systems of the first-tier airlines, and the communications costs, especially if they are using the SITA network can be huge
  • third-tier airlines are the real “suckers.” They are used by the GDS companies, and the upper-tier airlines, to justify “one-stop-shopping” promotions to travel agents and online consumers, but get the worst service in terms of information accuracy.

What Do Travel Sites Connected to the GDS Systems Do?

• They search the GDS schedule database for the requested destinations and dates
• For most airlines, they check the seat availability for these flights< based on GDS flight status data (remember, the flight inventory database is not part of the GDS system)
• They search for the lowest fares by reading fares loaded in “fast access storage” of the GDS computers, such as memory or cache (not the actual fares database).

While the resulting low-fare display may look like an AirKiosk system Low Fare Calendar, the GDS-powered response is not based on inventory availablity of the fares displayed. When a customer tries to book a seat, the next response could well be: “Sorry, this fare is no longer available.”

As more airlines, particularly low-cost carriers, decide not to be represented in the GDS systems (or not to offer their lowest fares through the GDSs), savvy travel consumers are learning where the true lowest fares are, and where they can actually be booked!

We are pleased that the AirKiosk system Low Fare Finder is motivating online travel sites to pursue similar functionality. We are sure that this, and other advanced functions available only to AirKiosk system airlines, will lead to a new travel distribution model, in which all airlines have an equal opportunity to compete for travelers based on the merits of their service and value, and not based on the information bias of the GDS model, in which realtime participation is not allowed to all airlines.

Jet2 Launches Low Fare Finder

Easy Changes on kulula.com

April 12, 2003

Best Domestic Airline winner, kulula.com is on the innovation trail again.

kulula.com is South Africa’s largest revenue generating website with 65% of all bookings done online.

“kulula.com has always been innovative and always looking for ways to make the lives of our superheroes easier. We are very excited to announce that our superheroes will now be able to make all their booking changes online, on their own, and more importantly these changes can be done out of office hours in the comfort of their own homes,” says executive manager, commercial Gidon Novick.

kulula.com are the first airline in the world to offer this type of service to its customers. By using the current online technology called AirKiosk Sytems, from a US-based company, it has allowed kulula.com to take airline bookings onto a new level.

If passengers are not computer literate, they can contact the call centre to make booking changes. The cost of changing bookings is R75 online or R100 through the call centre plus the difference between the old and new fare.

This new on-line service means that kulula.com passengers can change their bookings at home using their computer.

” This is the first of many new innovations and announcements that kulula.com are planning for the year. Watch this space,” concludes Novick.

- “kulula” means “easily” in Zulu – easy to book, easy to travel and easy to afford – kulula.com/flights can easily be booked online at www.kulula.com or by calling 0861-585852 or visiting a travel agent – Flight fares are from R315 one way between Johannesburg and Durban and from R525 one way between Johannesburg and Cape Town. – There are six return weekday flights between Johannesburg and Cape Town and two week-day return flights between Johannesburg and Durban. – kulula.com recently launched care hire with kulula.com/cars. These can be booked online at www.kulula.com, and cost just R165 per day.

Source: SATURDAY STAR TRAVEL
South Africa
April 12, 2003