Belinda Beresford
Too broke to pay full price for that ticket to Cape Town or around the world? Quailing at the thought of standby again? Why not try to catch your flight using a ticket auction on the Internet?
Ticket auctions allow you to offer a price for a ticket, usually subject to a minimum set by the airline. If your bid is the highest, you win the flight and the cost is taken from your credit card.
But it’s not as rosy as it may seem.
In South Africa buying tickets via an Internet auction is a fledgling operation. Your choice of airlines is restricted – it’s South African Airways (SAA) or nothing – and the airline only offers tickets on the site that it considers will not be sold otherwise.
SAA representative Mike Pheiffer admits the number of tickets offered for auction tends to be “very limited”, with only a handful on offer at any one time. He says tickets are sold at an average discount of about 50% on the one-way full economy fare. However attractive the prospect of a half- price flight to Cape Town, there are a number of downsides. How do you return since the auctions frequently operate only on a one-way basis?
And there are other restrictions. You can’t get a refund on your ticket, and upgrading or rerouting is not allowed. Child or infant fares are also excluded from the site. On the positive side, if you are a Voyager member you collect the normal airmiles.
You can bid on a ticket for someone else, and you can try for more than one ticket. Unfortunately this can be risky. For example, if you are planning a weekend away and bid the highest price for two tickets, you get them both. But if someone else offers to pay more for one ticket, you end up with just one flight. Since your card is debited automatically once you’ve won a bid, you could end up alone on the tarmac.
The auction site updates you by e-mail on the state of play, informing you if your offer has been beaten. This allows you to monitor your position without continually checking the Internet site.
But bear in mind that you won’t know if your efforts are successful until the auction shuts – it is usually open for 24 hours, but it can be longer. If during that time you see a more attractive offer or change your mind, it’s too late.
Given these restrictions and the limited number of flights, it is not surprising SAA says response to the site “hasn’t been overwhelming”, with only about 100 tickets sold since the auction began last year. But while SAA gingerly explores this less traditional way of selling tickets, Internet travel sales are a burgeoning business overseas, especially in the United States.
The California-based TravelClearingHouse Internet site offers a bargain basement ticket clearing service as well as a ticket auction to clients around the world. Examples of auctions include an 11-day $3 378 cruise for two on the Panama Canal which was bought for $749.
New twists have also been added to the basic auction. One alternative offered by US-based company TravelBids is the reverse auction, where travel agents offer for the right to sell tickets, rather than travellers competing to buy. An example would be if you were planning to travel from New York to Paris. You would list your journey on the TravelBids site and then buy the tickets from the travel agent offering you the lowest price.
Travel agents get a discount on ticket sales – in the reverse auction they pass part of this discount on in return for the passenger doing all the work of arranging and reserving tickets. The system relies on the fact that you hold reservations for journeys for a limited amount of time without actually paying. TravelBids claims to guarantee that all users get a discount of at least 6%.
Although this system can give lower discounts than a more straightforward auction, it has the great advantage of giving the traveller total flexibility in choosing their journey. Unfortunately for South Africans, both the ticket agents and the travellers have to be based in the US. However, the company expects this to change in the not too distant future.
One reason why auctioning airline tickets is slow in taking off in South Africa is the reluctance of airlines to antagonise their intermediaries, the travel agents. However, tourism and hospitality consultant Delano Caras says ticket auctions are just one manifestation of the sweeping changes facing the travel industry both in South Africa and worldwide.
“It’s a little bit like stockbrokers and anything else confronted with the threat of the Internet – its not going to supplant services, but will erode the base of their business,” he says.