Here is some recent information on availing of bargain fares on domestic flights.It is from BUSINESSWORLD, Jan 17, 2005.
It is unfortunately not Goa-specific. Goa-centric comments and feedback would therefore be much appreciated. ---------- The right flight A smart guide to choosing the cheapest airfare. Samar Srivastava Last month, Madhu, a student in Delhi, wanted to meet up with an old friend in Mumbai. The friend was coming for a short while, and that too, at a short notice. The thought of having to take a flight didn't worry Madhu. After all, with so many airline schemes and a no-frills airline to boot, getting a cheap seat wouldn't be a problem. So she thought. She couldn't have been more wrong. Phone calls to all the airline reservation offices yielded the same response: none of the cheap seats were available. Madhu should have done her homework - it is, by now, a familiar story. Discounted tickets have brought air travel within a sniffing distance of the middle class. But their supply is seemingly so short of the demand that some customers have come to see them as mere marketing gimmicks. The reality, on the other hand, is that there are possibly too many of such schemes (not seats, though) with too much in the fine print. So the customer is left confused, if not disappointed. Right now, there are as many as eight discount ticketing options for domestic travel offered by the three full-service carriers - Indian Airlines (IA), Jet Airways and Air Sahara. Often, customers like Madhu are unaware of the options and end up simply asking for the lowest fare. Even if they get such a ticket, they are often unaware that such tickets sometimes come with stipulations that make cancellations or changes an expensive proposition. Let's sift through the options, so that the next time you want to fly cheap, you can do just that. The Customer's Options APEX (Advance Purchase Excursion) fares are by far the most widely advertised of the discounted fare schemes. As the name suggests, you have to book tickets on the scheme well in advance. Note that different airlines have different advance purchase periods and the prices differ between the slabs. IA has only two slabs: 21 days and 7 days. Jet has three slabs - of 30, 21 and 15 days. Air Sahara, on the other hand, has five slabs starting with one 30 days before the journey, to one that's just five days before. Cancellation charges on these tickets are at a steep 50 per cent of the basic fare if cancelled within the advance purchase period (up to an hour before the flight). For cancellations before the period kicks in, IA charges a nominal Rs 100 and Jet charges Rs 250. Missed the advance purchase bus or don't have fixed travel plans? No problem. The full-service carriers also offer tickets without the advance purchase requirement. Soon after the launch of no-frills airline Air Deccan's launch on the metro routes, others added additional seats on discounted fares, ones without the advance purchase requirements. IA, Jet and Sahara have named them Fly Select Fares, Check Fares and Steal Fares, respectively. You can buy them close to the travel date. Cancellation charges - at Rs 500 for IA and Jet - are also not so high. You have yet another option: auctions. The first to introduce them was Air Sahara; it offers tickets 15-24 days before the flight. IA offers them 8-17 days before the flight. The bidding is fairly simple. After logging into the respective website, you will be given minimum and maximum bid prices. You can bid by simply entering the amount and your credit card number. If bids higher than yours are placed, you will be informed of them by mail. It would be up to you to match the highest bid. You would have to collect such a ticket from the airline office by quoting a PNR number that would be allotted to you. Air Sahara allows one date change requested within the auction period for a nominal charge of Rs 100. IA does not allow any modifications. Air Sahara has two additional offerings. First, you may go for happy-hour tickets for flights between 12 noon and 6 p.m. You can buy them outright as close as three days before the journey, but beware - such seats and flights are extremely limited. The other option is last-minute auctions. This too is available three days in advance and the bidding procedure is the same, save one thing: no modifications are permitted to the tickets. You will have to shell out Rs 75 as the booking fee for such a ticket. IA, being a domestic carrier that also flies some international routes, is often left with a lot of surplus seats on the domestic leg of its international flights. You can buy these tickets at a heavy discount without any advance-purchase strings attached. For example, you can buy a Hyderabad-Bangalore ticket for as little as Rs 1,475, compared to Rs 2,775 for a 21-day APEX, and a full fare of Rs 5,160. Normal full-fare cancellation rules apply, which means that they can be cancelled up to an hour before the departure upon payment of Rs 100. Yet another saving option is buying flight coupon booklets. These contain 4-8 coupons, each of which can be used for a journey during the validity period. IA (Super Smart Saver) offers a four-coupon booklet for Rs 26,000 and an eight-coupon booklet for Rs 48,000, with validity periods of 90 and 180 days. Jet (One Fare) and Sahara (Super Sixer and Super Four) offer four-coupon booklets for Rs 26,300 and Rs 26,500, and six-coupon booklets for Rs 37,800 and Rs 36,000, respectively; the validity periods are 90 and 120 days. Such tickets are treated as full-fare ones by the airlines, and hence don't suffer from limited availability like those on the special schemes. Although Night Saver flights on the busy Delhi-Mumbai sector have been operating for awhile, it's only recently that their fares have been slashed significantly. IA has a Night Saver flight only on the Delhi-Mumbai sector, which Jet has such flights on the Delhi-Mumbai, Delhi-Bangalore, Bangalore-Mumbai, and Mumbai-Hyderabad routes. The Airlines' Pricing Models The basis on which airlines allocate seats on discounted fares is extremely difficult to tell and no airline will ever reveal the basis on which such seats on a particular flight are allocated. There are two reasons for this. First, the airline does not want this information out in the public domain, as it would help competition. Second, it's a question that simply has no easy answer, as a different strategy has to be followed for each flight. What we can offer is the rationale that makes this pricing strategy possible. You would do well to keep some of these pointers in mind while booking such tickets. The number of seats allocated to a discount scheme depends upon factors as varied as the passenger profile, capacity, competition on that route, product offering, competitiveness, and past history of operations. The reason airlines discount their tickets is fairly simple: an empty seat is much worse than a discounted seat. At the same time, they must ensure that they are able to fill the maximum number of seats at the full fare and not offer too many seats at a discount. It's a fine balance indeed. While allocating discounted seats for a particular sector, airlines typically review the flight performance on the sector for the previous year. Flights usually start filling up closer to the date of travel and would average an occupancy rate of, say, 80 per cent. Based on these trends, the remaining seats are put out for advance purchase till, say, 7-15 days before the flight. Thereafter, seats are allocated dynamically, depending on how the occupancy is coming along, that is, how the market reacts to the scheme. A mistake that we often make while booking APEX tickets is to wait till the last few days of the advance purchase period. Remember that APEX tickets can be bought anytime before the advance purchase period. Actually, APEX tickets for popular routes are often booked out months in advance. Another effective strategy is to book on the next higher level of fares. For the Delhi-Mumbai sector, for example, the difference between a 30-day APEX fare and a 21-day one is only Rs 50. A bit of smart thinking can pay huge dividends while you book APEX fares. Choose you flight well - if possible, fly during off-peak hours, during off-peak days (weekends, for instance), and book well in advance. In effect, try and think like an airline would and you'll be able to pick the flight in a particular sector that would have more discounted seats. If your plans are likely to change, you are better off booking the slightly more expensive tickets with no advance purchase requirements, as the cancellation rules are far kinder on your wallet. The auction ticketing route is largely under-utilised by travellers. A random check revealed that several flights had not received even a single bid. Airlines also seemingly don't care for these seats, possibly having accounted for the worst - that they wouldn't sell after all. Some customers feel that constantly monitoring and upping your bid can be more troublesome than worthwhile. A lot of people fail to realise that there is also the option of purchasing your ticket at the highest bid amount, which usually works out 30 per cent cheaper than the full fare. Positioning flight fares are a real bargain and they offer the best of both worlds - ultra cheap fares and liberal cancellation rules. Use them where possible. After all, it pays to be informed. Ribandar
