The International Air Transport Association (IATA) has began a landmark travel countdown — it is now slightly less than 100 days to comprehensive flight e-ticketing worldwide.

Giovanni Bisignani, IATA’s Director General and CEO said, ‘In 100 days the paper ticket gets put in a museum. On June 1 2008, we will achieve 100% electronic ticketing.’

IATA began its global e-ticket drive in June 2004, with the dual goals of making travel and shipping more convenient and more cost efficient.

While a paper ticket costs $10 to process, e-ticketing reduces that cost to $1 which means the travel industry will save over $3 billion each year.

When the e-ticketing program began in 2004, only 18% of flight tickets issued globally were e-tickets. Today, according to IATA, global paperless penetration is 93%.

China has agreed to meet IATA’s 100% e-ticket deadline, which comes into force a little more than two months before the start of the 2008 Olympics in Beijing.

Source: BizChina

More people travel. More people buy travel tickets. Travel agencies, especially those who know how to work the Internet properly, make more money. China’s top online travel agent, Ctrip.com, made what has been called an ‘unexpectedly strong quarterly profit’ — probably the only people who did not expect it were the analysts — driven by rising travel demand.

Third-quarter profit almost doubled to $15 million, or 21 cents per American Depositary Share, from 12 cents a year earlier. Revenues rose to a record $46 million, as hotel reservations, flight bookings and package tours all posted strong growth.

Ctrip shares have risen about 84% this year. Ctrip said it was looking at opportunities presented by the 2008 Beijing Olympics to begin catering to inbound traffic, but added such business would be negligible next year.

CFO Jane Sun told an analyst conference, ‘The financial impact from the Olympics next year will not be significant.’

Revenue was split roughly in half between the mainland’s first tier and second tier cities. However, revenue growth from second-tier cities was 40-45%, almost double the 20-30% growth in the main cities such as Beijing and Shanghai.

The company is also facing pressure from airlines that increasingly sell directly to customers. This is true all over the world. The airlines, no matter what they say, love cutting out any intermediary. To overcome this, CTrip, and all the other players, must offer one stop shopping which is cheaper than the Internet savvy user could assemble from three or four sites.

Shenzhen Airlines has said passengers will soon be able to use their mobile phones and connect to the Internet during flights. The airline will be the first in China to offer the service.

Swiss technology firm OnAir is providing the service and said the move will allow travelers to call and send text messages from their mobile phones and access the Internet on laptops during flights.

Three aircraft from Shenzhen to Beijing and Shanghai will introduce the service ahead of the Beijing Olympics next year.

The OnAir service will be installed across Shenzhen Airlines’ full fleet of Boeing 737 and Airbus A320-family aircraft by mid-2009.

OnAir has earlier signed deals with other Asian and European airlines that want to introduce the technology, according to Benoit Debains, chief executive officer of OnAir. He didn’t elaborate on which airline is or will be the first in the world to provide the service in the air. Nor did he say how much the airlines will charge per call. Many passengers would like it to be $50 a minute. Or more.
Source: China Daily

The facts are easy. Sina.com, China’s largest portal with over 100 million monthly unique visitors, together with Qunar.com, China’s largest travel search engine with over 8 million monthly unique visitors is going to launch “Free Talk Travel”. This will be a blog publishing platform that will allow Chinese travelers for the first time to share their travel experiences in an innovative and interactive way.

Kevin Zhu, Life Channel Editor of Sina.com said, although it sounds like flack-speak, ‘We feel that Qunar will provide us the right travel industry expertise and consumer insights to co-develop this exciting new project. Both the blog platform and travel e-publishing are sure to be well-received by our users.’

Denise Peng, VP of Product Development at Qunar.com, ‘Sina is the right partner for us as we expand our service offering into the realm of travel 2.0. We’re looking forward to an outstanding cooperation!’

Well, yes. It will work but there is a tremendous potential problem which every similar site has already faced. Airlines get their staff to write in as innocent users lauding the airline to the skies. This is so common that most savvy users ignore all the positive comments and just look for the negative ones.

Keeping such a blog clear of flackery is well nigh impossible. An airline wants favorable mentions, the PR asks a friend and then another friend. And so it goes on.

An intelligent reading can spot when this has happened because the reports are over-enthusiastic. But it is almost impossible to police totally. No doubt this blog will be a success. But, equally, no doubt it will contain a fair amount of lying puffery about airlines and other travel facilities.

(The illustration comes from Sina.com and, no, there is no indication which airline it might concern. This is called diplomacy. And the picture is nicer than another aircraft.)
Source: CNN:Money