How much did you pay for your air ticket?
The airline industry has seen a substantial increase in the number of travelers in the recent years. People are living in a high paced action world where time is money. Whether it is a business visit or a vacation trip, every single minute wasted on travel can cost heavy. And the best and efficient route to avoid the time lapse is, soar through the sky!
How Airline operators make the most of it?
Airline operators identify their customers as two main categories, leisure travelers and business travelers. The leisure travelers are concerned about the ticket pricing. They are always ready to buy their tickets well in advance. In a competitive market, it is not possible to charge these travelers heavily as they have multiple options of going for another operator or even rescheduling the trip if they find pricing to be high. Airline operators compensate this through their business strategy to price business travelers heavily. Inflexible schedules, last minute planning and less sensitiveness to price changes of the business travelers are very well utilized by the airline operators. They charge high prices for tickets sold only a few days in advance.
To avail most of the ticket discounts offered by the operators, a traveler needs to book the ticket well in advance. The seats which remain unfilled during the last days before the flight are sold at the variable price tags. Operators strategy would be to look for frequent business travelers and offer them the tickets at a reduced price, this ensures the ticket is sold and that too at a good reasonable price. Frequent business travelers are happy, operator is also happy! This marketing methodology of the operators works out in most of the cases. If the demand for business travelers is low at that time period, operators look out for students and less frequent flyers. This is when you see, advertisement banners in the operator websites show casing the least air fare!
This business strategy reasons out why people flying adjacent seats in the same class are sometimes charged differently. So next time when you board a flight, check out with your co- traveler how much he paid for his ticket.
