Zuji overseas e-ticketing taking off Steve Creedy, Aviation writer 24may05
ONE in five Australian customers of online travel portal Zuji are prepared to buy an international airline e-ticket over the internet, as acceptance of online booking grows strongly.
Airlines have been strongly promoting e-ticketing as they move towards a 2007 deadline to end the use of paper tickets.
Although 99 per cent of domestic purchases on Zuji were issued as e-tickets by the end of last year, people have been slower to adopt the practice for international fares. At the start of 2004, just one in 100 international fares were issued in e-tickets. This surged to one in 10 by the end of last year.
"One of the phenomena of the Australian marketplace is that for the first quarter in 2005 our international e-ticket (purchases) is greater than 20 per cent," Zuji Asia-Pacific chief executive Scott Blume said.
"People said it was never going to happen. There are still some transactions that are too complicated online and that's the six stops around Europe. But one of our top 10 destinations, paying online with a credit card with an e-ticket, is London." Australian acceptance of online travel has also been reflected in Zuji's growth in the market - 70 per cent in the year to the first quarter of this year.
Mr Blume expected the market to grow steadily with expansion in hotel bookings and technology that would allow consumers to put together their own holiday packages.
He said there was already "dynamic packaging technology" in Europe and the US that allowed travellers to put together air and hotel components and pay a lesser price than they would if they bought them separately.
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