The advantage of low cost carriers

The LCCs were experimenting with all means of reducing cost and increasing operational efficiency and it helped the industry as a whole. Many of the established practices in flight operations were challenged by these operators. In an effort to reduce the cost of sales, they established booking engines on their websites to overcome the dependency on GDS systems. This opened the inventory of flights and other services to the public and the emerging tech-savvy generation enjoyed the freedom of making their bookings on their own laptops.

By making meal service optional, for those who prefer to purchase their meals on board the flight, the ground time of the aircraft in loading and unloading meal trays was reduced. This led to very short turnaround time and brought down the airport cost and improved aircraft utilization. Another innovation was to try to develop less used airports instead of clamouring for flight slots at the busy airports. This step reduced the cost for parking charges, congestions problems and also made the trip to the airport shorter for many passengers. They appreciated this move and began boarding flights from airports closer home.

Online travel sites – the ease of comparison

Travel portals that were growing in number and clout also found the emergence of low cost carriers a boon to their business.  By integrating the website of the LCC to their own air booking site, they made it easier for the passengers to compare the price and timings of various airlines operating on the same route in one click. This ease of making comparison before making the purchase is preferred by the experienced traveller instead of visiting so many websites for the same piece of information.

When some of the low cost carriers started sans due planning by the adventurous did not succeed, there was a pessimistic view that bubble of the LCC boom will soon burst.  If you look at the total picture, it is obvious that the Low cost carriers are here to stay and prosper as the tourism industry is rapidly growing around the world.  In fact, in many areas the LCCs are going to lead the way and others follow it, learning new lessons from this experiment.

Low Cost Carriers

Low cost airline operation is a recent phenomenon in the world of Travel & Tourism.  Yet, it has caught the imagination of the traveling public around the world and gained a lot of admirers and supporters.  It is appealing since the luxurious world of air travel is now affordable to more passengers and the low cost carriers have opened up destinations in remote places, hitherto skirted by the established carriers.

When the low cost airlines began appearing in the aviation horizon, many considered it a threat to the established “full service” carriers, eating into their customer base.  However, it became obvious before long that the LCCs have created a niche for themselves by catching the fancy of the emerging travellers and the middle-income group.  This group of passengers, once they were bitten by the air travel bug, is prepared to test the “full service” option, albeit at a higher cost.  Thus, the LCCs have enlisted more travellers to the growing list of tourists, instead of diminishing the customer base of the legacy carriers. 

International Air Transport Association

The International Air Transport Association (IATA) is an international industry trade group of airlines headquartered in Montreal, Canada, where the International Civil Aviation Organization is also headquartered.
IATA's mission is to represent, lead, and serve the airline industry. IATA represents some 230 airlines comprising 93% of scheduled international air traffic. The Director General and Chief Executive Officer is Giovanni Bisignani. Currently, IATA is present in over 150 countries covered through 101 offices around the globe.

The IATA Head Office are located at 800 Place Victoria (Montreal Stock Exchange Tower) in Montreal since 1977 (having been located at Central Station (Montreal) since its founding) and the executive offices are at the Geneva Airport in Switzerland.

Airline ticket

An airline ticket is a document, issued by an airline or a travel agency, to confirm that an individual has purchased a seat on a flight on an aircraft. This document is then used to obtain a boarding pass, at the airport. Then with the boarding pass and the attached ticket, the passenger is allowed to board the aircraft.
There are two sorts of airline tickets - the older style with coupons now referred to as a paper ticket, and the now more common electronic ticket usually referred to as an e-ticket.
Regardless of the type, all tickets contain details of the following information...

• The passenger's name.
• The issuing airline.
• A ticket number, including the airline's 3 digit code at the start of the number.
• The cities the ticket is valid for travel between.
• Flights that the ticket is valid for. (Unless the ticket is "open")
• Baggage allowance.
• Taxes. (It is normally a legal requirement to show taxes, even if the fare is not shown).
• The "Fare Basis", an alpha-numeric code that identifies the fare.
• Restrictions on changes and refunds. (Not always shown in detail, but referred to).
• Dates that the ticket is valid for.
• "Form of payment" ie, details of how the ticket was paid for, which will in turn affect how it would be refunded.

International Air Transport Association

 

The International Air Transport Association (IATA) is an international industry trade group of airlines headquartered in Montreal, Canada, where the International Civil Aviation Organization is also headquartered. IATA's mission is to represent, lead, and serve the airline industry. IATA represents some 230 airlines comprising 93% of scheduled international air traffic. The Director General and Chief Executive Officer is Giovanni Bisignani. Currently, IATA is present in over 150 countries covered through 101 offices around the globe.

The IATA Head Office are located at 800 Place Victoria (Montreal Stock Exchange Tower) in Montreal since 1977 (having been located at Central Station (Montreal) since its founding) and the executive offices are at the Geneva Airport in Switzerland.

IATA was formed on 19 April 1945, in Havana, Cuba. It is the successor to the International Air Traffic Association, founded in The Hague in 1919, the year of the world's first international scheduled services. At its founding, IATA had 57 members from 31 nations, mostly in Europe and North America. Today it has about 230 members from more than 140 nations in every part of the world.

History Sabre

Sabre was developed in order to help American Airlines improve the way in which the airline booked reservations. By the 1950s, American Airlines was facing a serious challenge in its ability to quickly handle airline reservations in an era that witnessed high growth in passenger volumes in the airline industry. Before the introduction of Sabre, the airline's system for booking flights was entirely manual, having developed from the techniques originally developed at its Little Rock, Arkansas reservations center in the 1920s. In this manual system, a team of eight operators would sort through a rotating file with cards for every flight. When a seat was booked, the operators would place a mark on the side of the card, and knew visually whether it was full. This part of the process was not all that slow, at least when there were not that many planes, but the entire end-to-end task of looking for a flight, reserving a seat and then writing up the ticket could take up to three hours in some cases, and 90 minutes on average. The system also had limited room to scale. It was limited to about eight operators because that was the maximum that could fit around the file, so in order to handle more queries the only solution was to add more layers of hierarchy to filter down requests into batches.