It all started out with Via.com offering a name-your-price kind of scheme in India. Others like Yatra.com, Cleartrip and MakeMyTrip offered similar schemes to bargain hunters who did not care what airline they flew or the exact schedule. While you could potentially be saving money on these tickets, they are sure not worth the headache you’ll go through
AJ
The hunt for cheap flight tickets has been as old as the day when airlines moved to a dynamic pricing model and all seats on a flight stopped costing the same price. The guy sitting next to you on the flight could have paid a fraction of your ticket price.
The last couple of weeks have been a lot of conversation about "Opaque Fares". While most of us are not so confident of e-commerce in India yet, we are happy to go out there and book our air tickets via the multitude of travel portals, since it gives the power of booking in our hands as compared to the travel agents earlier.
Last year, in their bid to expand their product offerings, some sites went out to experiment with a new offering where you could buy an air ticket fitting certain parameters and you could get it for cheap as long as you were not fussy about the airline you were flying. Airlines were hand-in-glove because they would receive an upfront cash payment for a slice of their inventory, even though they had to sell cheap. Since you did not know the airline you were flying, the exact schedule of your flight before take reserving your ticket, this practice was termed as 'opaque' fares.
In the western world, this concept had taken off with Priceline and Hotwire quite a while back. Priceline accumulated all the last minute unsold inventory and gave it away to bargain hunters who did not care what airline they flew and the airlines would get some revenue for a seat which would have otherwise gone empty.
In the recent past, it all started out with an upstart site Via.com offering a name-your-price kind of scheme in India. You select your destinations, your timeslots and your price, and the site would tell you if you could buy a ticket at your price or not. You don't know the airline yet, nor the exact time of your flight, or other details like will you be flying direct or stopping at two stops on the way. Once you pay up, you'll get an email with your ticket and the exact details you need to know to board the plane.
They further took it forward with a pre-paid scheme where they went about selling Rs 2,500 vouchers to travel anywhere in India as long as the passengers were okay not to know the airline before they paid up. Via.com was followed by many a portals such as Yatra.com, Cleartrip and MakeMyTrip which offered similar schemes with anonymous airlines being sold to customers
While most players of the industry were happy to fill up those empty seats on their planes, industry leader Jet Airways called these promotions "scam fares" and refused to participate in these offers. It also asked the regulator to look into the matter and intervene to stop the practice.
Jet Airways has good reason to complain. Everytime we fly on a Rs3,000 ticket from Mumbai to Delhi, we are flying below cost of that seat on the plane. Thanks to government-backed market competition (called Air India); airfares in India have been depressed for a long while. Some airlines had finally taken the leap to hike up fares again to cut their losses after Kingfisher Airlines almost crippled to a halt. And these fares, if they became big, would just mean you go back to selling tickets at a lower price again.
Another theory, though not validated in the open, was that all the portals had paid upfront cash to buy Kingfisher Airlines seats in bulk, and now that the airline was in trouble, they wanted to sell out cheap and make the best of what they had. And hence, these special prices, under whatever name they went, were a way to sell you Kingfisher Airlines tickets which you normally wouldn't touch due to their recent issues.
Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA), the aviation regulator in India, has also recently intervened in the "opaque fare" discussion, calling the practice of 'opaque fares' a violation of the regulations andissued an order to all airlines to withdraw from this practice immediately.
As I write this, some major portals have pulled out their opaque fare offers while some others are still continuing with these promotions. While you could potentially be saving money to the extent of Rs1,000-Rs1,500 or so on these tickets, they are sure not worth the headache you'll go through in case you end up being on a flight which is not to your preferences. So, buy only being aware of all the risks!
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