ICT and e-business in the tourism industry ICT adoption ... - empirica

Tourism
Intermediaries in ticket sales
Traditionally the majority of air travel tickets have been sold through travel agents,
whereas for other modes of transport many tickets have been sold directly by the
transport operator – especially in surface transport, where many passengers just ‘turn up
and go’. Since the late 1990s there has been a strong pressure on airlines to reduce their
commission costs and this, coupled with the development of the internet as a viable
alternative sales channel, has meant that more and more airline tickets were sold directly.
Meanwhile many airlines in the USA pay no commission at all, and in Europe a number of
airlines have decided to do the same. An important factor in the attempts of airlines to
reduce their distribution costs has been the development towards e-ticketing (cf. Graham
2006, Doganis 2006).
The implementation of e-ticketing
The International Air Transport Association – IATA – has established a working group on
electronic ticketing which addresses airline data interchange, interline revenue
accounting, passenger handling, fraud prevention, security, as well as legal and
facilitation issues. IATA has issued an ‘Electronic Ticketing Implementation Guide’ and
set up the aim to achieve a 100% penetration of e-ticketing worldwide by the end of 2007,
i.e. from the 1 st of January 2008, only e-tickets shall be issued by the world’s airlines. 71
Other public means of transport have also decided to switch to e-tickets, including
railways and coach operators. Operators of cultural and sporting facilities are promoting
e-ticketing as well. 72 E-ticketing may be a win-win situation: customers may obtain tickets
more conveniently and service providers may automate sales processes for tickets –
clearly a feasible measure to save costs. Apart from these core benefits, e-ticketing also
has other advantages: If tickets are sold over the internet, customers may need to
register themselves. In this way, sellers of tickets can identify their customers who might
otherwise remain anonymous in a classical ticket sale at the cashier’s desk. This may
deliver valuable data about the clientele – one of the basic requirements for the
application of customer relationship management (CRM).
IATA summarises the advantages of e-ticketing for the airline business as follows:
“For the customer this means stress-free ticketing, no tickets to lose and no last
minute queues for tickets on departure, together with greater opportunities for
using self-service kiosks.
For the travel agent, electronic ticketing will allow them greater opportunities to
manage the corporate travel experience by being able to make changes to the
actual ticket whilst the customer is on the telephone. […]
For airlines, it is estimated that approximately 9 US dollars in savings could be
made when an electronic ticket is issued instead of a paper ticket.” (www.iata.org)
71
72
Cf. www.iata.org/workgroups/etwg.htm
Other examples of e-ticketing were analysed in the case studies about the London Eye (2004)
and about Ski amadé (2005) in previous reports of the e-Business W@tch (cf. e-Business
W@tch / European Commission 2004 and 2005).
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