| BANGALORE: India‘s first low cost airline Air Deccan has made available its tickets on Indiatimes.com, a news and entertainment, auction portal of Times Internet Limited ((TIL)) owned by media giants Bennett Coleman & Co. This is a first time that Air Deccan is selling their tickets through another web site. |
| The entire inventory of tickets (around 10,000 daily) available on the Air Deccan website would be available to TIL subscribers. Times Internet MD and CEO Mahendra Swarup revealed that on off-peak days, TIL sold around 1000 air tickets daily as against 1500 on peak days, 60-70 per cent of which are by foreigners and Indians settled abroad, especially in the Middle East. TIL claim to be the only portal in India to auction airline tickets using proprietary auctioning technology. |
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| Air Deccan‘s Gopinath is looking at the large TIL subscription base, including those settled abroad, and is quite keen to grab a piece of the foreign sector through this initiative, Currently Air Deccan retails about 6-7 per cent of their tickets outside India through agents, without any advertising spends in foreign countries at all. Swarup while speaking to Indiantelevision.com on the sidelines of a press conference also revealed that TIL spends around Rs.200 million annually towards advertising, mainly web based, of which around Rs.40 million is spent towards the travel section advertising. |
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This initiative follows Air Deccan‘s recent announcement of their tie-up with HPCL in Kolkatta for selling Air Tickets to Club HP customers of HPCL petrol stations. |
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